MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mananaysiempre | 2025-08-10 15:01:36+00:00
Cool, yes. Useful or a good idea, I dunno. Reading through the (non-reference) documentation on SOM, I’m struck by how they never could give a convincing example for the utility of metaclasses. (Saying this as someone who does love metaclasses in Python, which are of course an inferior interpretation of the same academic sources.) The SOM documentation is also surprisingly shallow given its size: with a copy of Brockschmidt, Box, the COM spec, and the Platform SDK manual, you could reimplement essentially all of COM (not ActiveX though), whereas the IBM’s documentation is more like “here’s how you use our IDL compiler and here are the functions you can call”. (This is in contrast with the Presentation Manager documentation, which is much tighter and more detailed than the one for USER/GDI ever has been.) From what I can infer of the underlying principles, I feel SOM is much more specific about its object model, which, given the goal is a cross-language ABI, is not necessarily a good thing. (I’d say that about WinRT too.)

And of course COM does do implementation inheritance: despite all the admonitions to the contrary, that’s what aggregation is! If you want a more conventional model and even some surprisingly fancy stuff like the base methods governing the derived ones and not vice versa, BETA-style, then WinRT inheritance[1] is a very thin layer on top of aggregation that accomplishes that. Now if only anybody at Microsoft bothered to document it. As in, at all.

(I don’t mean to say COM is my ideal object model/ABI. That would probably a bit closer to Objective-C: see the Maru[2]/Cola/Idst[3] object model and cobj[4,5] for the general direction.)

[1] https://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2011/09/25/native-win...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20250507145031/https://piumarta....

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20250525213528/https://www.piuma...

[4] https://dotat.at/@/2007-04-16-awash-in-a-c-of-objects.html

[5] https://dotat.at/writing/cobj.html
by CogitoCogito | 2025-08-10 15:01:54+00:00
> What's ironic is that the ones doing this crap are usually the first to cry about internet censorship.

I believe most people against internet censorship are against _government_ censorship. I fall into that camp. I don't support government censorship of the internet, but I have no problem if individual website operators decide they don't want to serve a certain country.
by K0balt | 2025-08-10 15:02:26+00:00
I have an interesting observation about homelessness. I live in a country where the average household makes about US$6000 a year.

The cost of living here is about 1/2 of the USA, with rents about 1/4. The unemployment rate is about 5%.

Homelessness is very, very low (to the point of near invisibility) and mostly limited to illegal immigrants.

The thing that seems to make homelessness a non-issue here is the tolerance of ad-hoc construction. This leads to neighbourhoods where construction is really low cost / quality, but people are housed.

I don’t really understand why these neighbourhoods don’t devolve into hotbeds of violent crime as I would expect them to in the USA, but they mostly don’t.

Mostly, the construction tends to improve over time, and the neighbourhoods often gradually metamorphosize into more contemporary and inviting areas with vibrant small businesses and elegant homes.

I often wonder if it’s cultural, as poverty is not seen as failure but rather a temporary condition to be transcended as possible?
by pron | 2025-08-10 15:02:32+00:00
Fair enough :)

I guess one could claim that some feature is useful because it eliminates certain classes of bugs while another is useless because it eliminates certain classes of bugs (which happens to be the more impactful subset of the former class), it's just not a very compelling claim, especially the way you presented it, which is:

Something bad happens, say an attacker steals my data. Rust is useful because I can eliminate spatial and temporal safety as the cause, leaving only all others, while in Zig I can eliminate spatial unsafety as the cause (leaving all others), but that's just as useless as C, where I can eliminate neither spatial nor temporal unsafety as the cause.

I can see how it may be reasonable to argue that all are equally useless, but given that spatial unsafety is the largest subclass of unsafety that causes security vulnerabilities, I'm not convinced by the argument that eliminating it is completely useless while eliminating a somewhat larger class (i.e. adding a smaller marginal benefit than the first step) becomes very useful.
by borromakot | 2025-08-10 15:03:07+00:00
If I sounded snarky that wasn't my intention. At the end of the day though it doesn't feel like you read the article which was clearly in a different context than the one in which you responded. FWIW I didn't expect this small article speaking to a small audience (Elixir devs) to make the rounds on hacker news.

I agree on the importance of defining terms, and I think the important thing here is that "process" in Joe's parlance is not an OS level process, it is one of a fleet of processes running inside the BEAM VM. And the "system" in this case is the supervisory system around it, which itself consists of individual processes.

I'm critiquing a common misunderstanding of the phrase "Let it crash", whereby effectively no local error handling is performed. This leads to worse user experiences and worse outcomes in general. I understand that you're offering critique, but it again sounds like you're critiquing a reductive element (the headline itself).
by amdivia | 2025-08-10 15:03:25+00:00
> I can spend an entire day with a GPT and produce nothing of value.

Although I believe you, I think this is due to improper use. I know this sounds like a "you're holding phone wrong" moment, but I found many uses for AI that I feel addicted to what its providing me.

Like you I started with Vim long ago, in an attempt to reduce the thought -> code cycle. But after many years I started seeking something even faster, and LLMs seem to be it for me.

From a quicker navigation of the codebase, to quickly writing the boilerplate for me, adding debugging statements where I need. Believe me there is a big jump in productivity if you use it right. You just gotta keep trying until you develop a sense of what you can ask it to do and what it would be good for
by ModernMech | 2025-08-10 15:04:09+00:00
It's not a meaningless difference, it's a crucial one. The contradiction only exists if you collapse all the differences between people and abstractions of people -- crucially that the former are people and the latter are abstractions -- and claim they're the same. Which they are not.

Anyway, we've gotten far from the point, which is that LLMs are not people and you can't treat them as such.
by dartharva | 2025-08-10 15:04:28+00:00
You find it weird people don't want to starve? It may feel weird to you in your ivory towers but people still want to live no matter how demeaning their life gets.

Jobs are a product of the economy. In the end their prices (wages) move with market forces. The only way you deal with scarcity is by increasing supply (i.e. boosting industry), but alas there's always "intellectuals" like you sneering down on it as if people should just choose to die instead.
by donperignon | 2025-08-10 15:04:37+00:00
I’m still waiting that someone claiming how prompting is such an skill to learn, explain just once a single technique that is not obvious, like: storing checkpoint to go back to working version (already a good practice without using Llm see:git) or launch 10 tabs with slightly different prompts and choose the best, or ask the Llm to improve my prompt, or adding more context … is that an skill? I remember when I was a child that my mom thought that programming a vcr to record the night show to be such a feat…
by sidibe | 2025-08-10 15:04:52+00:00
Usually these extra insights are interesting but incorrect. Like here I think. I don't think there's any different expectations between someone saying "try and" and "try to" except it's maybe a very loosely correlated signal of social class

Another example is I've seen people several times online trying to argue y'all can be singular and all y'all is a way to make it clearly plural. Ok it's interesting that y'all is used as singular and all y'all isn't just about inclusion, but its not true.
by echelon | 2025-08-10 15:05:02+00:00
I also like how several linguists attempt to call out this usage as wrong:

> deemed prescriptively incorrect (Routledge 1864:579 in D. Ross 2013a:120; Partridge 1947:338, Crews et al. 1989:656 in Brook & Tagliamonte 2016:320).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

You can't really reign in language.
by Uvix | 2025-08-10 15:05:52+00:00
I don't know if Windows started as a porting layer but it certainly ended up as one. Windows was already on v2.x by the time Excel was released on PC, but the initial PC version of Excel shipped with a stripped-down copy of Windows so that it could still run on machines without Windows. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20241112-00/?p=11...
by shazbotter | 2025-08-10 15:06:38+00:00
People still have Facebook accounts? I genuinely don't know why anyone does at this point.

If you are a woman, did you know Facebook has been stealing menstruation data from apps and using it to target ads to you?

If you take photos with your smartphone, you know meta has been using them to train their ai? Even if you haven't published them on Facebook?

To say nothing of Facebook's complicity in dividing cultures and fomenting violence and hate...
by Santosh83 | 2025-08-10 15:07:20+00:00
This used to be the case many years ago. But these days practically every site pulls in content from several other sites, sometimes dozens. Fine tuning noscript to get such a site to work without obscure breakage will take a long time of trial & error, reloading again & again. Now consider that you've to do this for every one of your regular sites.

Noscript is just too painful for people who want to just browse the web. Its the gentoo of browser extensions. People with massive time & patience can do it yes, but the rest of us are best served by uBlock & standard browser protections.
by astrobe_ | 2025-08-10 15:07:27+00:00
> Personally i am not a fan of minimum wage. I rather have tax payer

Tax payer?

> in exchange for an agreed upon number of years of employment at an agreed upon fixed wage post-training (they cannot quit or will have to pay back the cost of training for example)

Well I've heard of such model once, a scam school used it for what basically was forced labor. Thankfully the contract was nullified by a court. It's not surprising to me, as I have heard too many stories of harassment and abuse at work.

There's not even a need for that, normal programs such as part-time school, part-time work paid half the minimum wage already exist in my country and are generally appreciated. But they exist mainly for skilled work only, such as engineer positions.

The issue is that you don't need much training for sidewalk cleaning, so "innovative" programs won't solve anything. What is needed is to push back against abusive practices caused by the imbalances of the worker market. Companies are predatory by nature.
by foldr | 2025-08-10 15:07:29+00:00
You can actually construct this using regular VP ellipsis (or possibly Right Node Raising?) in English, but it sounds weird and doesn’t convey the same meaning. So I don’t think so.

“I’ll try to ___ and see if I can go to the store tomorrow”. [where ___ is the VP ‘go to the store’]

Then you have the various syntactic facts mentioned in the article , such as the possibility of wh-extraction. This isn’t possible in an analogous ellipsis construction:

“What did you try and eat?”

* ”What did you try to and see if you can eat?”

There’s also an interesting tense restriction which suggests that there’s no independent elided clause:

*”I tried and go/went to the store yesterday.”
by CursedSilicon | 2025-08-10 15:08:00+00:00
I saw Action Retro's recent video on buying an old Google Search Appliance server and learned that many of them had been converted back to boring old Dell R710's

With a bit of effort and the help of a friend I was able to get the software stack up and running again!

I'd like to try getting one of the actual Google Search Appliance servers and attempting to flash its BIOS back to the Google branded one, but I don't currently have the money for the $1200(!) that eBay sellers seem to want for one
by duckerude | 2025-08-10 15:08:13+00:00
Rust has the clap_complete package for its most popular arg parsing library: https://crates.io/crates/clap_complete

ripgrep exposes its (bespoke) shell completion and man page generation through a --generate option: rg --generate=man, rg --generate=complete-bash, etcetera. In xh (clap-based) we provide the same but AFAIK we're the only one to copy that interface.

Symfony (for PHP) provides some kind of runtime completion generation but I don't know the details.
by dwheeler | 2025-08-10 15:08:20+00:00
> Learning how to use LLMs in a coding workflow is trivial. There is no learning curve. You can safely ignore them if they don’t fit your workflows at the moment.

I'm sprry, but I disagree with this claim. That is not my experience, nor many others. It's true that you can make them do something without learning anything. However, it takes time to learn what they are good amd bad at, what information they need, and what nonsense they'll do without express guidance. It also takes time to know what to look for when reviewing results.

I also find that they work fine for languages without static types. You need need tests, yes, but you need them anyway.
by sevensor | 2025-08-10 15:08:47+00:00
There is some truly execrable Python code out there, but it’s there because the barrier to entry is so low. Especially back in the day, Java had so many guardrails that the really bad Java code came from intermediate programmers pushing up against the limitations of the language rather than from novices pasting garbage into a notebook. As a result there was less of it, but I’m not convinced that’s a good thing.

Edit: my point being that out of a large pool of novices, some of them will get better. Java was always more gate kept.

Second edit: Java’s intermediate programmer malaise was of course fueled by the Gang of Four’s promise to lead them out of confusion and into the blessed realm of reusable software.
by BeauNer | 2025-08-10 15:09:04+00:00
The United States is still king of the AI hill in 2025. New numbers from TRG Datacenters show the country has 39.7 million NVIDIA H100 equivalent processors and a massive 19,800 megawatts of power capacity. No other nation even comes close.

China, on the other hand, has a different bragging right. It runs more AI data center clusters than anyone else, with 230 in total. But the raw computing output is much lower at just 400,000 H100 equivalents. It is a reminder that more buildings do not always mean more muscle.

France is an interesting case. It ranks fifth in total computing power but has the second largest stockpile of AI chips, more than 989,000. That is more than China, India, and South Korea. Clearly, owning a lot of chips is only part of the story.

TRG data chart The United Arab Emirates holds the number two spot overall with 23.1 million H100 equivalents and 6,400 megawatts of capacity. Saudi Arabia follows in third with 7.2 million. South Korea is fourth at 5.1 million but leads everyone in workforce adoption, with half of the nation’s workers using AI in some way.

Interestingly, this seems to indicate the UAE’s clusters are enormous. They pack over 13 times more compute per cluster than the U.S. and an eye-popping 637 times more than China. Essentially, they’ve skipped the “many small sites” approach and gone straight for ultra-dense, mega-scale AI hubs.

This is all happening against a backdrop of record AI infrastructure spending. Global investment hit $200 billion this year, and each country seems to be taking its own path. Some are building the biggest clusters they can. Others are focused on specialized chips. A few are banking on government policy to attract research and development from around the world.
by croes | 2025-08-10 15:09:14+00:00
„Everyone knows π is 3. It’s one of those cozy little facts, like cats landing on their feet or toast landing butter-side down. You don’t have to overthink it — circles just work that way. Ask any pie, and it’ll tell you the same thing.”

vs

π = 3.14159…

If it’s about correctness tone isn’t part of quality.
by fakedang | 2025-08-10 15:09:21+00:00
And somehow morons downvote you for speaking the truth.

My friends in India are all doing swimmingly well with the extremely huge increase in offshoring jobs to India. While in the 2000s it was tech support and in the 2010s it was auxiliary tech workers, today it's actual engineers, UX designers, product guys, even HR and admin functions. Turns out, everything can be sent off to India and LatAm, except for sales and department heads. While previously companies would hire right away from IITs to ship them to the US, today they're content with keeping them in India and letting them work remotely.

The impact of AI in corporate jobs is actually very minimal, but the use of it as a smokescreen for downsizing is uncountable.
by zahlman | 2025-08-10 15:09:31+00:00
The point specifically is that the "and" in "try and" conceptually should be "adding a second thing" (what they mean by "coordination"), but isn't doing so in a fully regular way. Specifically, it seems like it should coordinate "try to kill mosquitos" and "[actually] kill mosquitos", but that interpretation isn't fully compatible with how the word "and" normally works.

On the other hand, there does seem to be a nuance in the meaning of "try and kill mosquitos" that makes it not just a dialectical form of "try to kill mosquitos"; there's an implication of expecting success. One might also point out that "try" can be replaced with synonyms in "try to" ("attempt to kill mosquitos"), but not "try and" (*"attempt and kill mosquitos"). So this is a very particular idiom.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-10 15:10:00+00:00
> . It is "choosing" to pass this to a validator or some other tool, _for now_.

No, its not. The validation happens at the frontend before the LLM sees the response. There is no way for the LLM to choose anything about what happens.

The cool thing about having coded a basic ReAct pattern implementation (before MCP, or even models trained on any specific prompt format for tool calls, was a thing, but none of that impacts the basic pattern) is that it gives a pretty visceral understanding of what is going on here, and all that's changed since is per model standardization of prompt and response patterns on the frontend<->LLM side and, with MCP, of the protocol for interacting on the frontend<->tool side.
by bogwog | 2025-08-10 15:10:44+00:00
For me, if the site is broken and I'm interested in the content, I sometimes enable JavaScript temporarily without adding it to my whitelist. Deciding what to do when I encounter a broken site is the easy part.

The challenge is sites like StackOverflow which don't completely break, but have annoying formatting issues. Fortunately, uBlock lets you block specific elements easily with a few clicks, and I think you can even sync it to your phone.
by lemoncookiechip | 2025-08-10 15:10:55+00:00
First, I use both uBO + NoScript + ClearURLs (removes tracking from URLs) + FastForward (Circumvents sites like adfly) + A pop-up blocker of your choice (stronger blocking than default also whitelist only in my case). They're all popular add-ons on Firefox and should also be available on Chrome, or variants of them. You don't need them all, uBO is more than fine for most use cases, I've just gotten used to it for a few years.

>Do you just whitelist every site you come across if it's broken?

Mostly, yes, often temporarily for that session, unless I do not trust a website, then I leave. How I deem what is trustworthy or not is just based on my own browsing experience I guess.

>What's the security advantage here?

You can block scripts, frames, media, webgl... Meaning no ads, no JS... Which helps minimize the more common ways to spread malware, or certain dark patterns, as well as just making browsing certain sites more pleasant without all the annoying stuff around.

>Or do you bail if it requires javascript?

If I don't trust a website, yes.

>What about the proliferation of sites that don't really need javascript, but you need to enable it anyways because the site's security provider needs it to verify you're not a bot?

Not all sites require JS to work, or when they do, they do not require every single JS domain on a website to work. An example of this would be something like many of the popular news sites which try to load sometimes JS from 10 different domains or more and only really require one or none to be usable. Take CNN, I do not need to whitelist it's main domain via NoScript to read articles or navigate, but the moment I whitelist CNN.com, i see a flood of other domains to whitelist which are definitely not needed, like CNN.io, cookielaw.org, optimizely.com, etc...

Take Hacker News. It's viable without JS, I can read, navigate and comment, but if I want to use the search function, I need to whitelist algolia.com (which powers the search) or else I just see "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled". The search function not working is the most common issue you'll find if you block all JS by default.
by jvanderbot | 2025-08-10 15:11:21+00:00
Its true if you expect general intelligence. Its forgiveable for expecting general intelligence given the hype. But there's no real reason we should have expected a language model to create an image that is for some reason a perfect bicycle schematic (other than hype). And I'm not sure that imagery is actually a required format to demonstrate intelligence.

I bet it could generate assembly instructions and list each part and help diagnose or tune. And that's remarkable and demonstrates enough fake understanding to be useful.
by ratelimitsteve | 2025-08-10 15:12:01+00:00
Coming from the other side of this, I've had a good narrator sell me entire series in the past. The Grim Noir Chronicles is the first that comes to mind (idk if anyone remembers the terrible sitcom Perfect Strangers but he played Balki and in real life he has a buttery smooth baritone voice that I just adore) and anything that Soundbooth Theater touches, partly for Jeff Hays and partly because of the full-cast adaptations they do that feel like old school radio plays to me. I see no reason to use this over existing text to speech features. If i just want to mechanically turn patterns of light into patterns of vibration there's non-AI tech that will do that for free, and AI narration doesn't do what human narration does yet.
by hulitu | 2025-08-10 15:12:21+00:00
> Enter MVUX—a modern, state-driven evolution of MVVM inspired by unidirectional data flow architectures like Redux. MVUX simplifies UI development by shifting the focus from object binding and manual state tracking to declarative, immutable state and reactive updates

Stop using GTK5. We have now GTK6. It is better. Trust us. /s
by OJFord | 2025-08-10 15:12:23+00:00
Ahh, got it, thanks - re-reading it makes more sense with the example of it being possible:

> Usually, coordinated verb phrases can be preceded by both:

> 9) Reality is Broken will both [stimulate your brain and stir your soul].

which would be a better example and clearer to me the first time if it didn't use two nouns ('stimulate and stir your soul').