MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by indrora | 2025-08-10 06:35:32+00:00
Having done two rounds at different Fortune 10s (one being Microsoft) I can tell you: This isn't AI, this is the result of years of "make it work" and duct tape.

This is "It'll be safe if we leave it on the intranet" and then someone says "Zero trust!" and then all the sudden things that had authentication on the inside are also going through a new and different layer of authentication. A stack of totally reasonable expectations stack tolerance on tolerance, and just like the Sig Sauer P320, it has a habit of shooting you in the foot when you least expect it.
by jimbob45 | 2025-08-10 06:36:41+00:00
Surely a 15 minute phone screen at the beginning with an HR rep would help thin the field, no? Just something quick for them to show that they know how to act appropriately, dress professionally, show up on time, and speak the language. Plus it provides an opportunity for the HR rep to show a roadmap of the process and the candidate an opportunity to ask broad details in case they need to back out.

Caveat: I hate the concept of HR and the phone screen is an excuse to waste their time instead of mine. Also none of this applies if you have < 100 employees.
by roenxi | 2025-08-10 06:38:07+00:00
We know what uplifting lower class people looks like - the formula that works as seen in Asia, Europe and the US was masses of factories, lots of capital investment and tolerating high pollution. Minimum wages don't seem to be part of the equation. If this was about 'uplifting' people then the law proposed would be positive (ie, what should they be doing instead of working in fast food) instead of a negative one (people who can't justify a $20/hr wage can't be employed in fast food).
by prophesi | 2025-08-10 06:39:47+00:00
Hm I don't think so. You might be thinking about the file size, which is ~64GB.

> Native MXFP4 quantization: The models are trained with native MXFP4 precision for the MoE layer, making gpt-oss-120b run on a single 80GB GPU (like NVIDIA H100 or AMD MI300X) and the gpt-oss-20b model run within 16GB of memory.

If you _could_ fit it within ~60GB VRAM, the variability of the amount of VRAM required for certain context lengths and prompt sizes would OOM pretty quickly.

edit: Ah and MXFP4 in itself is a quantization, just supposedly closer to the original FP16 than the rest with a smaller VRAM requirement.
by uecker | 2025-08-10 06:39:52+00:00
Memory safety - as now being popularized by Rust in its current form - mostly corresponds to not having UB in C or C++. My point is that this not the only definition and not even the definition Rust started with.

Memory leaks are often a part of the definition of memory safety because otherwise it is trivial to fix use-after-free, i.e. simple never free the memory. Rust dropped this part because it was too hard. So in some sense the cheated a little bit.
by anthk | 2025-08-10 06:41:11+00:00
I used to like Debian when configuring ALSA/OSS, XFree86 and such was a source of nightmares. Thus, debconf as a middle layer mechanism to handle several distinct architectures, setups and hardware was a neccesity. Ditto with Yast2 on SuSE. By 2004-2005... not much.

Even a bare Slackware with KDE and KDEi (and even XFCE) can do tons of work by itself by just adding an user and accepting the default group belonging array by pressing 'up' at the prompt.

Heck, even OpenBSD, minus the volume automount, which can be handled in a breeze with toadd or tray-app in seconds; and if you are smart you can figure DBUS/FDo mount points and integrate then with XFCE/Plasma/Gnome without too much issues (hotplugd can handle device umounting if you set up doas.conf accordinly).

The rest? MESA and X.org will handle most of the graphics stuff. Video and audio drivers are autodetected on almost every GNU and *BSD. Printers are often wireless bound so any assistant with look it up fast and attach it to CUPS.

Still, I can't handle DPKG/APT's slowness, even if there are libre distros as Trisquel with it. If they rebased their distro as a simpler Parabola LTS release with either Mate or LXDE setups, the user experience would be almost the same, but installing packages would happen at a much faster pace.
by cyberax | 2025-08-10 06:41:59+00:00
"Let it crash" in Erlang/Elixir means that the process that serves the request is allowed to crash. It then will be restarted by the supervisor.

Supervisors themselves form a tree, so for a crash to take down the whole app, it needs to propagate all the way to the top.

Another explanation for people familiar with exceptions in other languages: "Don't try to catch the exception inside a request handler".
by troupo | 2025-08-10 06:42:50+00:00
> who put effort into figuring out good workflows for coding with LLMs are deceiving themselves, and are effectively wasting their time.

It's quite possible you do. Do you have any hard data justifying the claims of "this works better", or is it just a soft fuzzy feeling?

> The same goes for managing people, and yet somehow many good engineering managers can judge if their team is performing well

It's actually really easy to judge if a team is performing well.

What is hard is finding what actually makes the team perform well. And that is just as much magic as "if you just write the correct prompt everything will just work"

---

wait. why are we fighting again? :) https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical...
by josevalim | 2025-08-10 06:42:57+00:00
Processes can be marked as temporary, which means they are not restarted, and that’s what is used when managing http connections, as you can’t really restart a request on the server without the client. So the scenario above wouldn’t happen.

You still want those processes to crash though, as it allows it to automatically clean up any concurrent work. For example, if during a request you start three processes to do concurrent work, like fetching APIs, then the request process crashes, the concurrent processes are automatically cleaned up.
by jabl | 2025-08-10 06:43:49+00:00
I tried to repurpose an old laptop I had lying around as a "lie on the couch and surf the web or watch youtube" machine. It was one of the last 32-bit only cpus (pentium m), so I installed Debian bookworm (12) on it. Unfortunately it turned out it couldn't even play youtube videos at 144p without stuttering. So I E-wasted the machine.

I suppose as some kind of headless home server it could still have been useful. OTOH for something that runs 24/7 a RPi would use a fraction of the electricity and still be a lot more powerful.

So yes, beyond nostalgia and some embedded/industrial usecases, it's hard to see a use for a 32-bit only PC these days.
by bambax | 2025-08-10 06:43:56+00:00
As the post says, the problem with coding agents is they send a lot of their own data + almost your entire code base for each request: that's what makes them expensive. But when used in a chat the costs are so low as to be insignificant.

I only use OpenRouter which gives access to almost all models.

Sonnet was my favorite until I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro, which is almost always better. It can be quite slow though. So for basic questions / syntax reminders I just use Gemini Flash: super fast, and good for simple tasks.
by southwindcg | 2025-08-10 06:45:50+00:00
I loved my Commodore 64 back in the day. I wonder if it would be possible to purchase the rights to make licensed sequels to some of the big name C-64 games. I'm imagining taking original game code and feeding it into $LLM-of-choice and vibe coding updated versions, now that the new machines have increased memory. The same aesthetic, but no worries about squeezing the code onto a 5.25" floppy diskette.

That said, "starts at $462" might be a hard sell for that nostalgia, especially when that money could buy upgrades for my modern-but-aging PC.
by hx8 | 2025-08-10 06:46:51+00:00
I live a pretty frugal life, and reached the FI part of FIRE in my early 30s as an averagely compensated software engineer.

I am very skeptical anytime something is 'free'. I specifically avoid using a free service when the company profits from my use of the service. These arrangements usually start mutually beneficial, and almost always become user hostile.

Why pay for something when you can get it for free? Because the exchange of money for service sets clear boundaries and expectations.
by knome | 2025-08-10 06:48:20+00:00
erlang doesn't crash the program, it crashes the thread. erlang has a layered management system built in as part of OTP (open telecom platform, erlang was built for running highly concurrent telephony hardware). when a thread crashes, it dies and signals its parent. the parent then decides what to do. usually, that's just restarting the worker. maybe if ten workers have crashed in a minute, the manager itself will die and restart. issues bubble up, and managers restart subsystems automatically. for some things, like parsing user data, you might never cause the manager to die, and just always restart the worker.

the article, if you should choose to read it, is explaining that people have the misconception you appear to be having due to the 'let it fail' catchphrase. it goes into detail about this system, when failing is appropriate, and when trying to work around errors is appropriate.

as erlang uses greenthreads, restarting a thread for a user API is effectively instant and free.
by quitit | 2025-08-10 06:48:55+00:00
"Artists traditionally" is doing a bit of heavy lifting here. Neither artists nor art teachers explain a concept that all colours can be mixed from RBY primaries for the simple reason that the jig is up the moment they start painting. Rather artists very loosely describe these colours as primaries as a starting point to the concept of mixing colour.

In actual art classes they teach the colour wheel, which usually leads to around 6 colours being used for general painting in addition to white and other colours to darken. They're also not super fixated on what these colours should be specifically instead using terms such as "warm red and cool red", "warm blue and cool blue" etc. There is always a constant recognition that these will still present a limited gamut and that may be a deliberate artistic choice.

There is also an understanding that additional paints may be needed for getting a stronger colour or simply the convenience of not having to mix so much. This thinking continues through into professional printing hence the Pantone system or more interestingly with certain Epson printers that can include ink tanks specifically for violet, green, orange (amongst many others) - where the software will do the heavy lifting of blending these colours with the CMY model to produce a vivid gamut.

On the topic of "Key". Key is the pigment used to introduce detail and tone. For a two colour artwork the Key could simply be the darker of the two shades. We know it as black, but in some print processes it's an imperfect black-like colour that blends well with CMY to produce detail. Again in those Epson printers mentioned earlier, multiple blacks are used depending if it is to be used for creating detail in the coloured areas or simply as a block of black.
by b112 | 2025-08-10 06:49:07+00:00
That weird Russian hacker guy I arrested 4 years ago, wasn't making this up?

He had hacked 60%+ of the world's IoT at one point. Largest botnet we ever saw. Everyone's devices had developed weird delayed connectivity issues, variable pingtimes, random packet losses with re-transmits.

He kept saying he was trying to bring about emergent AGI, blathering on about spiking and variable network delay between IoT nodes, clusters, and blah blah blah.

"There's 10B IoT devices already!". He was frantic. Wild eyed. "I have to finish this".

Well I arrested his ass, and this won't work as a defense Segrey!

-- Random NSA agent
by atoav | 2025-08-10 06:51:19+00:00
The truth is that different errors have to lead to different results if you want a good organisational outcome. These could be:

- Fundamental/Fatal error: something without the process cannot function, e.g. we are missing an essential config option. Exiting with an error is totally adequate. You can't just heal from that as it would involve guessing information you don't have. Admins need to fix it

- Critical error: something that should not ever occur, e.g. having an active user without password and email. You don't exit, you skip it if thst is possible and ensure the first occurance is logged and admins are contacted

- Expected/Regular error: something that is expected to happen during the normal operations of the service, e.g. the other server you make requests to is being restarted and thus unreachable. Here the strategy may vary, but it could be something like retrying with random exponential backoff. Or you could briefly accept the values provided by that server are unknown and periodically retry to fill the unknown values. Or you could escalate that into a critical error after a certain amount of retries.

- Warnings: These are usually about something being not exactly ideal, but do not impede with the flow of the program at all. Usually has to do with bad data quality

If you can proceed without degrading the integrity of the system you should, the next thing is to decide jow important it is for humans to hear about it.
by kruffalon | 2025-08-10 06:51:48+00:00
Yes, outside everyday, summer is my season.

Although I prefer not being in direct sunlight I'm still in sunlight every day.

Interesting how sunlight is helpful, do you know/think it is the light in itself, vitamin D, both or something else?

My mistake, which in hindsight is obvious: I spent 3 days with a person at the end of their flu :)

Still worth!
by toast0 | 2025-08-10 06:52:41+00:00
Ok, so it's not really that you're not checking error codes. It's that you can write stuff like

ok = whatever().

If whatever is successful and idomatic, it returns ok, or maybe a tuple of {ok, SomeReturn}. In that case, execution would continue. If it returns an error tuple like {error, Reason}... "Let it crash" says you can just let it crash... You didn't have anything better to do, the built in crash because {error, Reason} will do fine.

Or you could do a

case whatever of ok -> ok; {error, nxdomain} -> ok end.

If it was fine to get nxdomain error, but any other error isn't acceptable... It will just crash, and that's good or at least ok. Better than having to enumerate all the possible errors, or having a catchall that then explicitly throws an eeror. It's especially hard to enumerate all possible errors because the running system can change and may return a new error that wasn't enumerated when the requesting code was written.

There's lots of places where crashing isn't actually what you want, and you have to capture all errors, explicitly log it, and then move on... But when you can, checking for success or success and a handful of expected and recoverable errors is very nice.
by LarMachinarum | 2025-08-10 06:53:18+00:00
The Colmi P8, which is older, long replaced by myriads of newer china watches and now hard to even find, was one of the last cheap smartwatches to be based on the nRF52832 microcontroller/SOC which had the advantage (for that purpose) of being both well documented and yet not locked down. The successor SOC, the nRF52840, already had a flash securing feature that (except for devices that wouldn't use it or that would have exploitable vulns) made it easy for the manufacturer to lock the device down and to prevent the install of alternative firmwares. Also about that time, cheaper chinese SOCs came out and cheapo china smartwatches switched to using those instead of nRF. Trouble being: most of those chinese SOCs for smartwatches, aside from probably also having the lockdown problem, don't have much in terms of openly accessible documentation or developer tools.

Consequently, pretty much all open source projects for cheapo china smartwatches apparently only support devices that are so old that you don't even find them anymore on aliexpress or other such shops.

I'd be interested to know for what currently easily available cheap (i.e. not in a much higher price category) china smart watches there is an open source alternative firmware that does not miss half of the features.
by Wilder7977 | 2025-08-10 06:53:47+00:00
This is not only a privacy concern (in fact, that might be a tiny part since the code might end up public anyway?). There is an element of disclosure of personal data, there are ownership issues in case that code was not - in fact - going to be public and more.

In any case, not caring about the cost (at a specific time) doesn't make the cost disappear.
by someoneiam | 2025-08-10 06:55:16+00:00
You sound like me. I've found some good uses for them generating ansible files for example (the output is regularly wrong, even with the latest and greatest model, but easy enough to correct). But otherwise, there always seems to be a cutoff in the complexity of a project where the ROI of just having to have built everything myself, and thus being completely immersed in the codebase, seems like it would have been much greater then prompting something to frankensteinian life.

But most of all, I love the act of programming and cannot imagine myself giving that over to an LLM. "Managing" an LLM is to me a soul crushing - maybe anti-intellectual, but definitely boring - task. And if that is what we as professionals will be required to do in the future, I'll just change profession.
by handoflixue | 2025-08-10 06:55:20+00:00
Humans have certain fundamental maintenance costs. $100/hr vastly exceeds maintenance. However, if you pay below those maintenance costs, then society effectively picks up the tab via other social costs and programs. For instance, if employers don't provide healthcare, then we either pay more for emergency medical treatments and other publicly-subsidized healthcare programs, or we accept being a country with a bunch of people dropping dead at age 40 of entirely preventable problems.

This is very different from most other goods, because no one really cares if you break your chair, the chair's parents didn't spend 18 years of their life on it, etc.. If you break a chair, you bear the full costs of replacing it.

Also, the full cost of replacing a human is vastly higher than the maintenance wage.
by justsomejew | 2025-08-10 06:55:37+00:00
Again, cannot reply directly. What I said was false, is saying, or suggesting, that what happened to the jews in Soviet Union was like what happened to the jews in nazi Germany. It was not.

By this I am not negating not Stalin repressions, not the "Doctors affair", not the fact that many gifted people could not realize their potential in a way they could have had otherwise.
by kasabali | 2025-08-10 06:56:29+00:00
> Debian maintainer (and upstream dev) is open to an upstream patch to add such an option

Wild interpretation right here.

There are only 2 realistic choices: Leave it as is or patch out the warning message in the Debian package

Debian maintainer is clearly deflecting the responsibility here because everyone knows very well that upstream wouldn't accept such a patch.

As it's already explained in the bug report, since Debian has no plan to do that migration in the near future, aforementioned warning isn't only useless and annoying, it's also potentially harmful, thus the correct action would be to remove it downstream like they did it in xscreensaver (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=819703#84)

But then they'd face the wrath of Lennart, so the only choice left is ignoring the report.
Show HN: MinimaTXT – local-only .txt notes App for iPhone
by Banev | 2025-08-10 06:57:26+00:00
Built a minimal text editor for iPhone that works with plain .txt files stored locally. No accounts, no cloud sync, no indexing. Includes basic internal search. Can use the system’s offline speech-to-text, which works well enough for quick voice memos. Not optimized for iPad yet.
by gary_0 | 2025-08-10 06:59:53+00:00
Unfortunately a C compiler isn't going to know what to do with your probably-unaligned pointer to 5 floats that you're doing mostly horizontal arithmetic on. And SIMD instructions provide zero benefit if the data is spread out in memory, as is the case for most C/C++ application code.

Otherwise, if you want to smack proper vectors and matrices together at high speed, libraries like Eigen or DXMath already abstract away the SIMD details and work great. For nitty-gritty stuff like codecs, that's always going to be handwritten with intrinsics (or ASM), and that's fine. And libc functions like memcpy already use the fastest, fanciest instructions. It's mostly a solved problem.

Lastly, for a lot of tasks, regular math instructions are plenty fast. On modern CPUs, you need to be doing a lot of math before worrying about SIMD is worth it. And once your program becomes particularly math-heavy, you'll probably want to use the GPU instead anyways.
by slacktivism123 | 2025-08-10 07:00:00+00:00
>What exactly leads you to make this sort of claim?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29651993

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365295

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038591

>are you just running your mouth off?

Don't be snarky. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by drysine | 2025-08-10 07:00:03+00:00
>the hundreds of thousands of kids that Putin kidnapped

But when asked for the list of children, Ukrainian regime managed to produce a list with only 339 names and not too convincing explanation of this hundredfold reduction compared to previous claims.

This bit of propaganda exploiting and twisting Russian evacuation of children without parents from the war zone didn't age well.

"When asked why Kyiv didn’t present a more extensive list, given that 339 names are less than 2% of the total number of forcefully taken children, Euronews sources explained it was a decision based on previous experience.

“There is a risk that Moscow would try to buy time claiming it takes longer to check the names, while trying to change the identities of Ukrainian children further, making it impossible to track,” the source said." [0]

[0] https://www.euronews.com/2025/06/04/ukraine-demands-return-o...
by nicbou | 2025-08-10 07:01:18+00:00
What about buying used?

I have this unofficial policy of buying used for frivolous purchases. The extra effort of browsing classifieds and arranging the purchase means that I must really want something before I get it. It also means that nothing gets extracted from nature and shipped around the world to satisfy a weak desire.

I've also been much more selective about which objects I allow into my home. I'm older now and I realise how long these objects stay in my life, so they might as well spark joy every time. Again, the long process of acquiring something means I avoid a lot of impulse purchases, and end up with fewer, better objects.
by toast0 | 2025-08-10 07:02:33+00:00
> If it has been crippled so that it can't run in reverse, that's crappy and unfortunate, but it makes it no less of a heat pump.

Yes, it pumps heat, but it's generally not referred to as a heat pump if it doesn't have a reversing valve and all the accoutrements that go with it (coil defrost heater, etc). I wouldn't say not having all those parts make it crippled, a refrigerator/freezer isn't crippled because it can't heat food, although some commercial units can be set to keep cold food cold or hot food hot because they have reversing valves.

If you have utility natural gas at reasonable prices, gas fired heat can be very economical, and it might not be forseable that you would ever use electricity for heating, in which case a reversing valve is a waste of capital.