MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mustache_kimono | 2025-08-30 17:54:22+00:00
> Damn. I was enjoying not having to deal with the fun of ZFS and DKMS, but it seems like now bcachefs will be in the same boat, either dealing with DKMS and occasional breakage or sticking with the kernel version that slowly gets more and more out of date.

Your distro could very easily include bcachefs if it wishes? Although I think the ZFS + Linux situation is mostly Linux religiosity gone wild, that very particular problem doesn't exist re: bcachefs?

The problem with bcachefs is the problem with btrfs. It mostly still doesn't work to solve the problems ZFS already solves.
by sevensor | 2025-08-30 17:54:39+00:00
The best way to think a few steps ahead is to make as much of your solution disposable as possible. I optimize for ease of replacement over performance or scalability. This means that my operating assumption is that everything I’m doing is a mistake, so it’s best to work from a position of being able to throw it out and start over. The result is that I spend a lot of time thinking about where the seams are and making them as simple as possible to cut.
by stevenicr | 2025-08-30 17:55:01+00:00
npr had a segment not too long ago exposing this and walked through the steps for one company, and it led to additional training for HR and the first line of checking resmume's and such - can't recall the date it ran.

There have been similar stories recently: https://www.techtarget.com/searchSecurity/feature/How-to-spo...

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/06/12/cybersecurity-indust...

https://cloud.google.com/transform/ultimate-insider-threat-n...

https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/fbi-warns...

I think the npr segment was like a third party cybersecurity podcast they aired to buffer time in daytime(?)
by derefr | 2025-08-30 17:55:47+00:00
That seems odd. Even with an A2A protocol, don’t you still need to standardize a client “surface” or “API” or whatever, so agents can describe IDE actions they want to trigger in the expected terms over that protocol?

Or is A2A like USB, where it acts as both a registry of, and “standardized standardization process” for, suites of concrete message types for each use-case?

Like, yeah, when a "client" drives an "agent", that's no different than what any generic "agent" would be doing to drive an "agent"; an IDE or what-have-you can just act as the "parent agent" in that context.

But when an "agent" is driving a "client", that's all about the "agent" understanding that the "client" isn't just some generic token-driven inference process, but an actual bundle of algorithms that does certain concrete things, and has to be spoken to a certain way to get it to do those concrete things.

I had assumed that IBM's older ACP was in large part concerned with formalizing that side of interoperation. Am I wrong?
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-08-30 17:56:22+00:00
I've very much enjoyed maintaining or optimizing or hardening existing systems--I can just never convince my leadership to let me do that.

My current org has a terrible case of not-invented-here syndrome, and it's so easy to pitch new projects that solve something that there's already an existing tool for, or building a new feature. We would love to spend time just working within our existing systems and fixing crap abstractions we made under the deadline-gun, but we're not "allowed" to.

> [...] humans like to build the new, and nobody likes to maintain the old

I think this is certainly true at organizational scale, but most of the people I've met are change-resistant overall.
by lbreakjai | 2025-08-30 17:56:45+00:00
Is it a lack of interest, or are they being priced out? When I was in university around 2010, you could do a very decent night out for 20€, and crash in your mate's student room, for which they paid 250€ per month. You'd meet friends, friends of friends, and your social circle would just expand.

Now the rent tripled, 20€ gets you a beer and a bus ride, and people stay home with the same few friends, if they're bothered to do anything at all.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-30 17:57:08+00:00
You are on a site hosted in that backwards country, funded by people from that backwards country, using technology initially developed by that backwards country, on a thread about new SOTA technology originating from that backwards country, almost certainly using software and hardware from that backwards country to spout offensive things about that backwards country.

Maybe the US isn't as backwards as you might believe, or maybe Airbus is a backwards company for using feet and knots? Perhaps different measurement systems have their virtues (give me an exact integer representation of 1/3 of a meter. For a foot it is 4 inches. For a yard it is 1 foot or 12 inches.)

For the record, the US made the metric system the preferred system of measurement 50 years ago. So you are also uninformed in your attempted insult about US exports (1975, Metric Conversion Act). Americans also learn about the metric system in school, and are more than capable of using it when it matters (the American weapons that Europe and Ukraine seem so fond of use the metric system).

I don't live in the US, but I have lived there in the past, and making sweeping insults about 400 million people is something I learned not to do.
by procaryote | 2025-08-30 17:57:29+00:00
> I don't want it to decide to send me to a 37 hour trip with three stops because it is 3$ cheaper.

This sounds hard; as in: if you can define and enforce what a good enough response from an LLM looks like, you don't really need the LLM

> what is the intent.

For the HR person you have a human with intents you can ask; for an LLMs it's harder as they don't have intents
by close04 | 2025-08-30 17:57:44+00:00
Physical/chemical maybe not, but biologically there might be strong reasons to not allow a complex organism to live forever. Evolution might be accounting for a lot of the reasons leading to the death of the individual organism. For one it would stimulate evolution itself and also alleviate the inevitable resource pressure.

A species that lives forever must adjust to reproduce relatively slowly to not overwhelm the local environment. A species that lives short lives will reproduce at much higher rates. So at any time the fewer “immortal” individuals would be vulnerable to competition from the many “mortals”, or to predators.

Humans are a special case because we don’t operate only on biological imperatives so you could make immortal humans but with implications we can’t even think of now. Maybe our limitation will not be biological but societal.
by ghaff | 2025-08-30 17:57:49+00:00
Certainly, some companies just aren't hiring today so even knowing the right person probably doesn't help. But my (few) jobs over the past 25 years--including one right after 9/11--came through personal connections and didn't even involve a response to a job posting. In fact, in the last case, the job position was created for me. I'm a bit sorry I never checked to see if there was an associated posting on the jobs site.

But I've certainly been lucky. A few dodged bullets.
by artninja1988 | 2025-08-30 17:57:56+00:00
Agree with Peter Woit's reply to Aaronson's post.

From the article: Given the ever more obvious case that genocide is going on in Gaza, I had been thinking that Scott Aaronson’s going quiet on the issue meant that he was starting to realize that this had become indefensible. Turns out I was very wrong.

In his latest blog posting, he explains that the current situation in Gaza is analogous to an evil murderer kidnapping your child and strapping her to train tracks before an oncoming train. If you pull a lever to divert the train it will instead kill five of the murderer’s children. This situation provides for him a definition of Zionism:

> Zionism, to define it in one sentence, is the proposition that, in the situation described, you have not merely a right but a moral obligation to pull the lever—and that you can do so with your middle finger raised high to the hateful mob…

> Zionism, so defined, is the deepest moral belief that I have.

Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.

Source: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=15191
by fsckboy | 2025-08-30 17:59:06+00:00
>It's hard to believe that anyone who thought that a Mac was the right computer for them could so easily switch to Linux on hardware which has a great number of unsupported features

his story makes complete sense in the space in which he wrote it, and therefore you are writing complete nonsense. sounds to me like he was already familiar with unix style computing, and he didn't get a mac originally because it supported something that linux didn't, like most users. "with the Mac it just works" is a 30 or more year ago marketing message

still, this was the last straw for him, as he literally said, enough was enough.
by echelon | 2025-08-30 17:59:26+00:00
That's 100% on the mark. Infants aren't dying anymore.

Real longevity is hard science and we're still at the punch card phase of biology.

Wake me up when we can make headless, full body monoclonal donors for human head transplants. Antigen free / HLA neutral so immunosuppressants are a thing of the past. That'll cure every cancer except brain and blood, cure every other injury, and increase health span of everything but the brain.

The tough problems:

- religious ick and luddite ick

- artificial gestation

- deactivating the brain stem without impacting development

- keeping the body physiologically active and developmentally normative

- head transplants that preserve spinal cord function

- lots of other ancillary issues with changes to pulmonary and immune flux.
by loteck | 2025-08-30 17:59:41+00:00
Any discussion of Salt Typhoon should start with the unusual fact that it is still an active and uncontained incident, despite having been widely revealed in 2024. Typically we are accustomed to discussing lessons learned during a post mortem. This particular mortem has not yet posted. We are still owned and data continues to be compromised.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/28/china_salt_typhoon_al...
by echelon | 2025-08-30 18:01:08+00:00
You're not dreaming big enough.

"Accept death, it's beautiful" is cope. It's not beautiful. It's suboptimal horror.

I find it offensive that so many "universe experiencing itself" entities willingly accept a return to dust. Our sun dies, and with it everything on this planet will become metal inclusions in a decaying solar body. You know what doesn't matter in light of that? All other perspectives. Every other conception of death and meaning tends to zero.

I accept death personally. It's 99.9999manynines likely. But I would love to spend my limited energy trying to conquer it or to push forward the societal envelope. Something from earth should conquer the vastness of spacetime and physics.

It's not like how any of us spends our time matters anyway. We're all already dead, geologically timespan speaking.

And who knows. Maybe the gods of the future will reverse simulate the light cone down to your femtosecond neurotransmitter flux. Maybe that's you right now. And maybe they'll pull you forward into an eternity of bliss instead of a read-only memory or sadistic eternal hell simulation. But probably none of those things given how more likely we are to accept doom.
by notahacker | 2025-08-30 18:01:45+00:00
I suspect that for all the attention certain politics and niche subcultures promoting disengagement get, it mostly comes down to spending less time in mingly social environments with the opposite sex, something young unmarried Indian men frequently expressed disappointment with and is also increasingly the case in the West for a different balance of reasons. The average reason may be different, but of course the US has its small towns full of conservative parents and India has its internet addicts and workaholics.

(Not sure if there are directly comparable surveys, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that unmarried Americans were rather more sexually active than unmarried Indians, even with the downward trend)
by 9rx | 2025-08-30 18:03:41+00:00
> The interface ideally doesn't change

The whole of the interface is the unit, as Beck originally defined it. As it is the integration point. Hence why there is no difference between them.

> And most of the units you're writing are probably internal-facing

No. As before, it is a mistake to test internal functions. They are just an implementation detail. I understand that some have taken unit test to mean this, but I posit that as it is foolish to do it, there is no need to talk about it, allowing unit test to refer to its original and much more sensible definition. It only serves to confuse people into writing useless, brittle tests.

> So I'd be quite happy treating it as a unit in its own right

Right, and, likewise, you'd put it in its own package in its own right so that it is available to all sort cases you have. Thus, it is really its own program — and thus would have its own tests.
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-30 18:04:12+00:00
> - Mort wants to climb the business ladder.

I think the personas have some validity but I don't agree with the primary focus/mode.

For example, I tend to be a mort because what gets me up in the morning is solving problems for the enterprise and seeing that system in action and providing benefit. Bigger and more complex problems are more fun to solve than simpler ones.
by ghaff | 2025-08-30 18:04:28+00:00
Yeah. Even without being overly candid, I don't think I'd ever have had an issue giving a fairly lucid answer to that question even if I left out the "And I need to eat part."

If there's some naive optimism in the answer, the company can take that into account in the context but may also decide the candidate is going to be disappointed or is BSing.
by irrational | 2025-08-30 18:05:06+00:00
Is it just genetic? On my father’s side, people typically live to 100 at a minimum and are perfectly healthy mentally and physically right up till a week or so before they die. My grandmother is 103 and can still lives alone in her house and can walk unassisted, has a memory sharp as anything, and so on. Maybe look at long lived families and figure out what is different about them?
by sixtyj | 2025-08-30 18:05:44+00:00
In Hollywood, they have 12 types of scenarios. Choose your type of life. Tragedy? Love story? Adventure? Becoming someone? Life is too short to experience all scenarios that is why we want live longer…

After 60 life sucks. Not always but very often.

So we should use Tim Urban's life-week calendar to being aware how little time we have and not waste it.
by singron | 2025-08-30 18:06:31+00:00
This article is so devoid of specifics, I'm not entirely sure I know what they are proposing. A VM implies an instruction set of some kind with control flow, registers, etc. but they spend the whole article on authorization, which seems orthogonal to the concept. I think what they really mean is a sandbox, jail, or container where a "syscall" equivalent let's the model interact with the outside world.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-30 18:06:42+00:00
You dodged the question.

And so you voted for the greedy, utterly corrupt criminal instead. I really wonder how you could come to this utterly bizarre conclusion. Trump isn't an example for anybody, least of all your kids, and god forbid they'd look at a woman that made it to president and think that that might be something to aspire to. Incredible.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-30 18:07:08+00:00
> I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments

No, you didn't, because humans behave quite differently to your average animal. The only strong selective pressure you described was climactic: everything else can be mitigated with straightforward tool use. (And heck, going "oh, our skin is getting sunburned, let's be nocturnal instead" might cause your A-islanders to develop paler skin.)

You seem to be confusing "observed data in the real world" and "things that seem obviously true". If you pit your "obviously true" against other people's "obviously true" in your own head, of course your own "obviously true" is going to be the victor.
Show HN: Give Claude Code control of your browser (open-source)
by nharada | 2025-08-30 18:07:16+00:00
As I started to use Claude Code to do more random tasks I realized I could basically build any CLI tool and it would use it. So I built one that controls the browser and open-sourced it. It should work with Codex or any other CLI-based agent!

I have a long term idea where the models are all local and then the tool is privacy preserving because it's easy to remove PII from text, but I'd definitely not recommend using this for anything important just yet. You'll need a Gemini key until I (or someone else) figure out how to distill a local version out of that part of the pipeline.

Github link: https://github.com/moonshinelabs-ai/skipper-tool
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-08-30 18:08:59+00:00
That's interesting that it's that short. I remember a long while ago I had aspirations of implementing a custom board for Prestonia-/Gallatin-era Xeons and the datasheets and specs for those was around 3000 pages, iirc. Supporting infra was about that long as well. So I'm surprised to see a modern ethernet controller fit into the same space. I appreciated all of the docs because it was so open, I felt like I could actually achieve that project, but other things took priority.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-30 18:10:42+00:00
[EDIT: Biologically] immortal doesn’t mean indestructible. It just means they don’t age.

Lobsters aren’t truly biologically immortal. They “continue to grow throughout their lives,” with “increasing amounts of energy” being needed to mount ans they grow larger [1]. “Eventually the cost is too high and lobsters can die from exhaustion.” (That said, if our cells aged like lobsters we’d live something like thousands of healthy years.)

For true biological immortality, look to some jellyfish [2]. You literally can’t tell if a cell is taken from an old or juvenile.

[1] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/are-lobsters-immortal.html

[2] https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/immortal-jellyfish-secret-to-...
by lotsoweiners | 2025-08-30 18:10:45+00:00
> And yet they are reduced to playing popular radio stuff to make money. Lowest common denominator stuff that gets pumped out like products to a wide global audience. That's what people ask them to play. It just feels soulless.

Why though? I’ve played in both original and cover bands and had the most fun playing “the hits” in cover bands to be honest. I think it is the audience feedback and knowing that we are playing beloved songs that I enjoyed.
by quectophoton | 2025-08-30 18:11:14+00:00
... and then that `callNewModule` has weird bugs like mysteriously replacing `+` with spaces, sometimes labels are empty but only if they are shipped to a specific company, sometimes the invoices are generated multiple times for the same shipment, after 1 year after Sales has already sold this multi-item shipment feature to massive companies it suddenly stops working because the new module wasn't properly hooked for auto-renewing credentials with a specific service and the backlog of unshipped items but marked as shipped grows by the second...

Of course Eager Beaver didn't learn from this experience because they left the company a few months ago thinking their code was AWESOME and bragging about this one nicely scalable service they made for shipping to multiple addesses.

Meanwhile Grey Beard is the one putting out the fires, knowing that any attempt to tell Project Manager "finding and preventing situations like this was the reason why I told my estimate back then" would only be received with skepticism.
by lilerjee | 2025-08-30 18:11:40+00:00
Cognitive Load is not what matters, Solving problems is what matters.

"Cognitive Load" is a buzzword which is abstract.

Cognitive Load is just one factor of projects, and not the main one.

Focus on solving problems, not Cognitive Load, or other abstract concepts.

Use the simple, direct, and effective method to solve problems.

Cognitive Load is relative, it is a high Cognitive Load for one person, but low cognitive load for another person for the same thing.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-08-30 18:11:53+00:00
I don't see the case for, what IMO is, more complexity by creating a virtual machine.

We have user accounts, Read/Write/Exec for User/Groups. Read can grant access tokens which solves temporary+remote requirements. Every other capabilities model can be defined in those terms.

I'd much rather see a simplification of the tools already available, then re-inventing another abstract machine / protocol.

I hope we'll eventually get a fundamental shift in the approach to software as a whole. Currently, everybody is still experimenting with building more new stuff, but it is also a great opportunity to re-evaluate and, at acceptable cost, try to strip out all the cruft and reduce something to its simplest form.

For example - I found an MCP server I liked. Told Claude to remove all the mcp stuff and put it into a CLI. Now I can just call that tool (without paying the context cost). Took me 10 minutes. I doubt, Claude is smart enough to build it back in without heavy guidance.
by monooso | 2025-08-30 18:11:58+00:00
Laravel uses the active record pattern, same as Rails. If anything, the Laravel implementation is the more pragmatic of the two.

It's fine if you don't like that pattern (I have my own misgivings), but it's a perfectly viable approach used by a lot of very experienced developers to build very successful applications.

Dismissing everyone who uses a framework or design pattern you dislike as "junior developers who don't care about pesky things like maintainability and scalability" is inaccurate, rude, and ignorant.
by vdupras | 2025-08-30 18:12:02+00:00
I don't know, I'm seduced by the elitist approach: code with a high cognitive load keeps mediocre developers away.

Case in point: Forth. It generally has a heavy cognitive load. However, Forth also enables a radical kind of simplicity. You need to be able to handle the load to access it.

The mind can train to a high cognitive load. It's a nice "muscle" to train.

Should we care about cognitive load? Absolutely. It's a finite budget. But I also think that there are legitimate reasons to accept a high cognitive load for a piece of code.

One might ask "what if you need to onboard mediocre developers into your project?". Hum, yeah, sure. In that case, this article is correct. But being forced to onboard mediocre developers highlights an organizational problem.
by KronisLV | 2025-08-30 18:12:12+00:00
Perhaps!

Though it would be nice if they had the option of choosing that for themselves, instead of being told that they don't really want long lives and that they should kneel before biology. Whether they're content with 100 years or 100'000 years, that should be up to them.

Or, as others pointed out, if at least whatever amount they're gonna be around for was more dignified and they had a better quality of life, instead of their bodies slowly wasting away.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-30 18:12:55+00:00
> isn't telomeres a physical/chemical/biological reason we can't live forever?

It’s one component, but not the only reason [1].

Naked mole rats’ telomeres do “not shorten with age but rather showed a mild elongation” [2]. They are long lived, for rodents, and don’t degrade into balls of cancer [3]. They nevertheless age.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senescence#Theories_of_aging

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6651551/

[3] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe0174