MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bgwalter | 2025-08-23 12:46:02+00:00
It is hard to get an unbiased discussion like it would have been in the 1990s. The Linux Foundation is corporate sponsored and even funds PyTorch, with all the exuberant "AI" language:

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/welcoming-pytorch-...

Kernel developers work for large "AI" booster corporations and may or may not experience indirect pressure. It is encouraging that there is still dissent despite all of this. Perhaps there should by anonymous proposals and secret voting.

The Linux Foundation's "AI" policy is sketchy. It allows content generated "whole or in part using AI tools".

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/legal/generative-ai

Definitely code generated "in whole" cannot be copyrighted or put under the GPL, as discussed recently here, see the top comment for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568
by KronisLV | 2025-08-23 12:47:02+00:00
> A new project and it’s going to be your best ever

A good defense against this is borrowing stuff from your prior projects, alongside eventually creating templates for the most common stuff.

For example, in new side projects I start, I can borrow the web server (ingress) configuration from the prior ones, same for CI pipelines and a large part of the previous Dockerfiles, sometimes even entire services with all of the annoying setup and configuration stuff already done.

Plus, this way, you have a more or less working baseline and further iteration is entirely up to you - and if you do want to improve things a bunch, then the next time your template will be even better and you'll be able to backport whatever you think everything should have to your other projects as well.

Going with the simplest solutions along the way helps: Bash scripts for triggering builds, CI configuration just calling those, using Docker or similar containers for the environments and builds, your ingress just being Nginx/Caddy/Apache2/..., using PostgreSQL or SQLite and specialized stuff like Redis/Valkey, RabbitMQ, MinIO and so on instead of reinventing the wheel.

Sometimes it's also useful to write utility scripts and even small tools to help with the projects, I bet developers that have been around for decades and are way better than I am have a lot of that stuff, alongside a healthy helping of dotfiles for existing tools to get in the zone while doing the dev work. Although it can also be helpful to go the YAGNI route and customize things as little as possible, like a stock IDE install, not even bothering with the color themes or keybinds or a plethora of plugins - just install and go.
by StellaMary | 2025-08-23 12:47:11+00:00
For reference, my test case: a 40MB XLSX with ~200k rows.

Parsing with this WASM build: ~16ms (on Chrome, M1 Mac).

Parsing with JS (SheetJS): seconds, often >5s, with UI stutter. So the speed difference is very noticeable on big files.

Curious if anyone here has even larger datasets to try!
by hatefulmoron | 2025-08-23 12:47:19+00:00
> Isn't soreness basically guaranteed to some degree if you've done enough work to actually build strength?

Not really. If you're eating/sleeping well and training consistently it's completely normal to not feel soreness (that is, excluding the immediate discomfort that rapidly subsides). I can't speak for all forms of exercise, but certainly it's normal when lifting weights, even to failure.

That said, if you're just starting out you will notice a lot of soreness. Many people look back on the early DOMS and wish they could feel that sort of "positive feedback" again.
by motohagiography | 2025-08-23 12:47:24+00:00
it's a passive reference, and kind of a dog's eye view of why things happen. things have concrete causes, with people who want things for specific reasons.

in tech, if you have accepted that tech is inferior and what you have when you aren't valuable, then sure, you're a dog, but if you are engaged in delivering a product that delivers value, there is no separate "the business," just the concrete need that you are a part of, imo.
by reify | 2025-08-23 12:49:12+00:00
This is not how human beings are supposed to engage with each other.

I dont like saying this. But it has to be said. I find that these people are generally very simple minded and uneducated.

Meaning that, the only education they get is from other uneducated, simple minded people who post the same simple minded uneducated shit.

On the Hierarchy of men they would be on the bottom rung of the ladder.

Its a case of the classic lone single brain celled mollusc sitting behind a computer screen who laughs out loud to himself when he types the "N" word, calls a women a slag or whore, or call men they dont agree with, a Paedophile, when they could not explain what a Paedophile is, let alone explain what the word hebephile means.

I always think of this scenario that is missing from all social media.

A group of middle aged men are sitting at a table in the local pub having a few drinks.

A young man arrives, stands at the bar, drinking on his own. After a few drinks he starts to verbally abuse the bar maid. The bar maid is visible upset.

The men at the table see, and over hear what the younger man is saying. These men are respectful of women, they have mothers, wives, sisters and female children.

A few of the men decide to go and have a quiet chat with this young man.

They decide that the young man needs to be taught a few lessons about being a real man.

The men have a long conversation with the young man about how to be respectful towards women.

The young man eventually apologises to the bar maid and to the men.

For an eternity this is how older men and fathers have educated young men how to behave and act in society.

social media is not representive of any moral society that I am aware of.
by Fluorescence | 2025-08-23 12:49:59+00:00
> There is nothing in the word “theft” that implies depriving someone of physical property.

Of course there is. It's origin is the crime of taking of tangible property owned by someone else without consent. It did not apply to intangible property because it predates any concept of legally protected intellectual property that can be duplicated without loss.

Now, there was also the metaphorical use of theft for non-criminal / non-tangible things but poetic use of language shouldn't be confused with primary meanings. For example, "plagiarism" comes from the Latin for "kidnapping" coined playfully by a comic. It was never a crime or ever resembled actual kidnapping. If you call your poem "my baby" because of how precious it is to you, it doesn't become one. Badly editing your poem is not murder either yet you might complain in such dramatic terms.

You might want to argue something about metaphors and secondary meanings but we shouldn't consider the crime of kidnapping to mean reciting other's verses any more than a summer's day should mean temperate people. If we start taking metaphorical uses literally then you also have to start claiming silly things like most kidnapping being legal.

Only in later industrial society did the metaphor become less metaphorical in written law for criminal acts that emerged post-printing-press that were being called fraud, deception, infringement and piracy.

> deprives the owner of privacy

It's pretty metaphorical to describe such things as property that can be stolen.

With this latitude you can frame every injury as theft e.g. stabbing is the theft of good health, murder is theft of life, perjury is theft of a fair trial etc. You might choose to use such language because it's how we roll, but we also know that, as offences, they are not theft.

When an item cannot be traded or restored to the owner, is it property that can be owned and stolen or are concepts of injury, damage and destruction more legitimate?

When it comes to intellectual property, it's closer to contract law where citizens are compelled to abide by contracts the state issues and enforces. The movement of intangible theft from metaphor into law for breaching such a contract was popularised by the beneficiaries to rhetorically inflate an illusion of loss and justify severe sanctions for acts not considered unlawful for most of human history.
by beagle3 | 2025-08-23 12:50:14+00:00
It actually does all these things. Quite well, even - in my experience better than systemd.

I didn’t use nitro, I’ve been using daemontools (which nitro is an evolution of) for decades. Incredibly easy to use, incredibly stable, understand, and control.

There is no well defined way to do dependencies (what if your dependency dies 3 seconds into the process? There are many right answers). The djb/daemontools way is just “it’s your problem. But here are the reliable simple cheap tools to start, stop and monitor your dependencies”.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-08-23 12:50:19+00:00
I just asked an LLM "What is the capital of Swaziland?".

It answered "Mbabane" along with information about the fact that the country is now called Eswatini.

There was no mention of the fact that there are actually 2 capitals --- Mbabane (the administrative capital) and Lobamba which serves as the executive seat of government.

The point being --- any "answer" from an LLM is questionable. An unreliable or incomplete answer is information but it is really not an *answer* (in the traditional computing sense) if additional work is reasonably required to verify and prove it as such.
by pron | 2025-08-23 12:51:05+00:00
> we already have enough unsafe languages as it is

By that logic, we definitely have enough safe languages as it is, as there are many more. But this safe/unsafe dichotomy is silly, and is coloured by languages that are unsafe in some particular ways.

1. Memory safety is important because memory-safety violations are a common cause of dangerous security vulnerabilities. But once you remove out-of-bounds access, as Zig does, memory safety doesn't even make it to the top 5: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html I.e. the same logic that says we should focus on safety would lead us to conclude we should focus on something else.

2. Memory safety has a cost. To get it, you have to give up something else (there could even be a cost to correctness). That means that you have to consider what you're getting and what you're losing in the context of the domain you're targeting, which is not the same for all languages. C++, with its "zero-cost abstractions", believed it could be everything for everyone. That turned out not to be the case at all, and Zig is a very different language, with different goals, than C++ originally had.

Given Zig's safety guarantees (which are stronger than C++'s), and given its goals (which are different from C++'s), the question should be what should we be willing to give up to gain safety from use-after-free given the language's goals. Would more safety be better if it cost nothing? Of course, but that's not an option. Even Java and Rust could prevent many more dangerous bugs - including those that are higher risk than use-after-free - if they had more facilities like those of ATS or Idris. But they don't because their designers think that the gains wouldn't be worth the cost.

If you don't say what Zig programmers should give up to gain more safety, saying "all new languages should be memory-safe" is about as meaningful as saying we should write fewer bugs. That's a nice sentiment, but how and at what cost?
by kllrnohj | 2025-08-23 12:51:33+00:00
> So the future is Zig. He got there first.

The future is many things, but a love letter to C is definitely not it.

Zig is cute and a fun hobby project that might see above average success for a hobby project. But that's about it. It doesn't address the problems people actually have with C++, not like Rust or Swift do, and it certainly isn't going to attract any attention from the Java, JavaScript, C#, Python, etc... of the world.
by archi42 | 2025-08-23 12:53:40+00:00
That's pure anecdata. We don't even know your workload or configuration.

Contrary anecdata: I just replaced my old SSDs: 2013 64GB 20nm MLC at 19% wear level and a 2018 500GB TLC at 34% wear level. Not because they failed, but because I had the OS on a 64GB RAID1 and needed more space. Only optimization was setting "noatime".

But that's still a horrible small N, so even the comined data is essentially meaningless.

btw, I replaced them with a bunch of HGST DC SS200 1.6TB from 2018, two of which have about as much capacity as your 30 disks. The 15nm MLC NAND is rated for 3 DWPD and has a 3% wear level. The dual ported SAS3 interface is overkill for me.

I went for a 5 disk RAID6, and could replace it another 8 times while still keeping some spare change for a visit at a gourmet restaurant.
by danaris | 2025-08-23 12:56:04+00:00
> Amazon.com Inc is currently worth 2.4 billion dollars and the only reason is that most businesses insist on giving their customers the worst online experience possible.

This is an incredibly reductive view of how Amazon came to dominate online retail. If you genuinely believe this, I would strongly urge you to research their history and understand how they became the monopoly they are today.

I assure you, it's not primarily because they care more about the end user's experience.
by DannyBee | 2025-08-23 12:56:55+00:00
Only in a world where features are made without thought. Documentation is not just for your users. Writing the development documentation helps you make better features in the first place.

The zig users on this thread seem to not understand this, and all seem to think documentation is a thing you write later for users when everything settles down. Or is somehow otherwise "in the way" of feature and API development speed.

That is a very strange view.

If writing developer documentation is having serious affect on your language feature velocity, you are doing something very wrong. Instead, writing it should make things move faster, becuase, at a minimum, others understand what you are trying to do, how it is going to work, and can help. Also, it helps you think through it yourself and whether what you are writing makes any sense, etc.

Yes there are people who can do this all without documentation, but there are 100x as many who can't, but will still give high quality contributions that will move you along faster if you enable them to help you. Throwing out the ability to have these folks help you is, at a minimum, self-defeating.

I learned this the hard way, because i'm one of those folks who can just stare at random undocumented messy code and know what it actually does, what the author was probably trying to do, etc, and it took years till i learned most people were not like this.
by fmajid | 2025-08-23 12:59:35+00:00
I realize the OP was using rugs as a metaphor, but they are works of art, just as much as samurai swords would be for Japan.

Rugs were prized in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures like Iran, where all your valuables had to be mobile. Traditional rugs require many, many hours of craftsmanship and are indeed works of art with deep cultural resonance. Turkmenistan even features a rug on its national flag.

Sadly, also a dying art despite its millennia of history as most rug weavers in Iran or Turkey have better options in factories or jobs. For the moment dirt-poor areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Tibet still weave, but the future is machine-woven rugs from China, possibly with machines deliberately designed to mimic the imperfections of hand-woven ones.
by ApeWithCompiler | 2025-08-23 13:00:25+00:00
The following is the best I could collect quickly to provide backup to the statement. Unfortunally it's not the high quality first instance of raw statistics I would have liked.

But from what I have read time to time the crawler acted magnitudes outside of what could have been accepted as just badly configured.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/the-great-scrape/

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...

https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/

https://tecnobits.com/en/AI-crawlers-on-Wikipedia-platform-d...

https://boston.conman.org/2025/08/21.1
by dtagames | 2025-08-23 13:00:32+00:00
Telling an LLM that something is a fact or the thesis doesn't make it one. We can't get around the predictive nature of how models and transformers operate by using different tokens. It's still just tokens, all the way down.

In fact, your complicated prompt will probably lead to summaries that have incorrect "facts" in them and arguments that don't fit your "thesis." That's because that text exists in the training data and you can't hand-wave it away with promoting.
WLFI: Why Pre-Market and Spot Access Matter More Than Just Results
by ALIUDHHA | 2025-08-23 13:00:37+00:00
Trading WLFI recently gave me some useful perspective. I closed shorts at +6%, +11%, and +22%, but what stood out wasn’t only the results—it was how the pre-market and spot phases worked together on BingX. Having the ability to enter before full market activity gave space to position early, and spot provided confirmation once liquidity started flowing. It made trading less about chasing moves and more about planning ahead. In a fast-changing space like crypto, I’ve noticed it’s not just technical setups that matter, but also the timing and structure of access. WLFI showed me how early entry points can provide an edge without needing to overtrade. Do you prefer early positioning or waiting for confirmation?
by RossBencina | 2025-08-23 13:01:32+00:00
I agree. I've been experimenting with writing DoDs for anything longer than an hour's work (things that often end up taking a month.) It helps. I think there's also something to setting structured goals, and sequencing mid-term sub-projects. If you can define scope and definition of done for the current sub-project then you can be clear on what is important now, and what you can defer for a later phase.

Relatedly, I've been hearing a bit about goal hierarchies lately. This seems like a more flexible approach than reducing everything to a TODO list and/or backlog. (Here's a random description of goal hierarchies that seems like a good introduction: https://www.spcperformancelab.com.au/personal-training-advic...)
by Forbo | 2025-08-23 13:01:46+00:00
Edit: I mistook the bsky.sh domain, my bad. Can't get strike through to work for the life of me. I give up.

~~Bluesky blocked in Mississippi, try to work around it, only for the resource that tells you how to do this to be hosted on Bluesky, which is blocked. That's... suboptimal~~.

I can't help but feel like Bluesky is just three corporations in a trenchcoat pretending to be an open federated ecosystem.
by jeffhwang | 2025-08-23 13:01:51+00:00
I’ve had 5 personal Mac laptops over the last 25 years. And all of them overlapped their service lives bc I usually had 2 active laptops at a time. None were the Pro, just iBooks and MacBook Airs.

The one I just retired was my portable workhorse from 2014-2024. I got annoyed towards the end bc the latest OS wasn’t supported (but still got security updates for my old macOS version at least).

Overall, I never needed to replaced battery, hard drive, cpus, screens or really any of the hardware on any of them over 2 decades. And I got at least 6 yrs out of each one.
by raudette | 2025-08-23 13:02:40+00:00
I don't think it was so much the business practices, but the market that shifted - I think it was a viable business for most of the 90s - there were a lot of these shops, but most have disappeared. It made sense to build for a use case to save on parts, but now, the most basic PCs handle most computing tasks with ease.

Purchasing decisions in business and government were more ad-hoc - I can remember selling and servicing a small number of PCs to embassies, even federal government offices buying 1-5 units. Now they'd buy standard off the shelf boxes in huge quantities.

I just can't imagine now, a foreign embassy calling in to their local PC shop for service, and having a local 17 year old walk in to service a diplomat's PC.
by lazarus01 | 2025-08-23 13:03:01+00:00
I can share a very simple incentive for exercise.

As you age, you will lose lean muscle and bone density. But you do have some control in maintaining a healthy level of strength for your elder years.

You can maintain strength and density by engaging in resistance training.

The total amount of training required is up for debate. I follow Dr. Peter Attia and he discusses needing about 1 hr a week of resistance training.

The other aspect of maintaining strength is protein intake. Dr. Attia describes it as a “chore”, that is to consume 1g of protein supplement for each pound of body mass. That’s a lot!

Think about your future, do you want to be strong and mobile into your later years? I see older unhealthy people walking the streets and don’t envisage myself letting that happen.

You must take good care of yourself and put in the time to exercise and eat properly.
by glynnormington | 2025-08-23 13:05:23+00:00
I take your point as I'm retired. But I had my previous working life squarely in mind when writing the post.

"Sustainable pace" helps, which in my case came down to 37 hour working weeks, not working at weekends, and taking all my vacation (and some extra when my employer let me buy it). I know this might sound like madness to Americans, but as a Brit employed mostly by American companies, it worked fine for me.

I found that taking plenty of breaks during the working day helped. Coffee breaks with colleagues, a decent lunch break (ideally including exercise), and plenty of tea breaks. So many times I've had a good idea or solved a problem during a break, so they are actually productive.

Then there's finding other useful things to do which aren't as taxing as the thing that's blocking you (e.g. the next large feature). Fixing bugs, writing docs, and doing preparatory investigations about the upcoming work are all productive ways to give yourself a bit of a mental break. (This was hardest when working in teams with continual short sprints or doing XP and pairing, but if I allowed myself to start to burn out, my productivity started to decline - essentially my brain was forcing me to take things a little more slowly in order to recover.)
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-23 13:05:34+00:00
How can you determine whether it makes accurate predictions? This isn't always as trivial as you make it seem. Even the data's trustworthiness requires proxy measures like provenance and criticism of figures one takes as trustworthy. And even then you have to be able to evaluate the data to determine whether it predictive, which itself requires skills and domain knowledge.

The idea that we can live without authority is nonsense. We can't. So, when dealing with subjects where we are out of our depth, we must learn ways to discern who is likely to be more trustworthy, and this often requires using proxies. Institutions exist to help makes this possible, even if they are not infallible, and they alone do not suffice: basic reasoning and tradition also factor in.
by nicoburns | 2025-08-23 13:05:51+00:00
It's different now with the main Android manufacturers offering 5-7 years of security updates. But for a long time the lifetime of an Android device was 2 (maybe 3) years, where as iPhones offered 5 years (maybe up to 7).

Perhaps not relevant if you're the sort of person who upgrades every year or two anyway. But a big deal if you're not.
by the-rc | 2025-08-23 13:06:06+00:00
No, especially after congestion pricing, it doesn't get very busy. I assume the car was mapping the area and collecting background truth in general. Downtown and the financial district have interesting peculiarities, like the highly irregular grid and the patches of open air construction that have been in the middle of Greenwich St for many years, exposing tens of pipes and cables carrying who knows what.
by matt_kantor | 2025-08-23 13:06:28+00:00
"Ruining" in the sense that "I worry that when I [use em dashes] people will assume my writing is LLM output".

I'd feel the same if I was someone who naturally frequently used phrases like "you're absolutely right", or for a much more extreme analogy: if I was a Hindu living in Europe in the 1920s and then the Nazis came along and "ruined" the swastika for me.