MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eru | 2025-08-13 01:46:01+00:00
Even with UB holes plugged, C (and C++) are still unsafe, because there are many assumptions you might want to make that you can not encode in the language.

To get an example that's easy to understand: before the introduction of the 'const' keyword, you just couldn't express that some variable should never be changed. And no amount of UB sanitisers would have fixed this for you: you just couldn't express the concept. There's lots of other areas of these languages that are still in a similar state.

Eg there's no way to express that a function should be pure, ie not have side effects (but is allowed to use mutation internally).
by eqvinox | 2025-08-13 01:46:38+00:00
I need to point out a subtlety that is might or might not be intended in that comic: it's bystanders, or consumers of the 14 standards, trying to fix it.

Unicode was invented by Xerox and Apple employees. USB-C was developed "by Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum."

To be clear, it's not about the huge companies, it's about the people doing the heavy implementation work. They can change 14 standards into 1. And in most cases - with rare exceptions - only they can do that.
by FloatArtifact | 2025-08-13 01:47:02+00:00
Accessibility is dead to me on Wayland... Until emulate key, mouse presses in other windows, registering global hotkeys that isn't a hack and Enumerating window title and executable.

Wayland fragmented development efforts on Linux. It's gotten a little better as some compositors consolidate, but still pretty awful to cobble together a stack that works for the features above.
by superkuh | 2025-08-13 01:47:06+00:00
Well, most of the time applications don't work around the new problems wayland has introduced. Most applications on most wayland compositors cannot be used by people who need screen readers.

These days in many places supporting the differently abled legally is on the way out, but I still think it's a good thing. And yeah, the dollar figures smell, but this is a real problem that the waylands introduced by not being a single wayland. One that has so far only been addressed by GNOME in their compositor by introducing two entirely new acccesibility protocols with no support for the last 30 years of accesibility.

If you want to actually be following the guidelines of American's with Disabilities Act of 1990 this might matter to you.
by coolguy4 | 2025-08-13 01:47:49+00:00
It would be cool to do some evening shifts at a restaurant, for the novelty and the social aspect (compared with staring at a screen all day)... plus the work is cognitively very simplistic... quite relaxing compared to corporate life. The problem is, if I have a day job as an engineer, my regular income puts me in a high tax bracket. So, not only would I be earning close to minimum wage, I would be taxed at the highest tax rate on the minimum wage... so it really would be a waste of time. Progressive tax rates are what makes it unviable for high income earners to pick up a weekend or evening job.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-08-13 01:48:33+00:00
I would wager the compute for the OCR is cheap. Just get a beefy local desktop PC, if it runs overnight or even takes a week that's fine.

It's the Google Maps API costs that will sink your project if you can't get them waived as art:

https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/

Not sure how many panoramas there are in New York or your metro, but if it's over the free tier you're talking thousands of dollars.
by bithive123 | 2025-08-13 01:49:03+00:00
There are no "things" in the universe. You say this wave and that photon exist and represent this or that, but all of that is conceptual overlay. Objects are parts of speech, reality is undifferentiated quanta. Can you point to a particular place where the ocean becomes a particular wave? Your comment already implies an understanding that our mind is behind all the hypothetical lines; we impose them, they aren't actually there.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-13 01:49:23+00:00
There is an important implication of learning and indexing being equivalent problems. A number of important data models and data domains exist for which we do not know how to build scalable indexing algorithms and data structures.

It has been noted for several years in US national labs and elsewhere that there is an almost perfect overlap between data models LLMs are poor at learning and data models that we struggle to index at scale. If LLMs were actually good at these things then there would be a straightforward path to addressing these longstanding non-AI computer science problems.

The incompleteness is that the LLM tech literally can't represent elementary things that are important enough that we spend a lot of money trying to represent them on computers for non-AI purposes. A super-intelligent AGI being right around the corner implies that we've solved these problems that we clearly haven't solved.

Perhaps more interesting, it also implies that AGI tech may look significantly different than the current LLM tech stack.
by michtzik | 2025-08-13 01:51:31+00:00
I did some minimal searching for Seattle and explosions in 2020 and I found plenty of sources reporting on different supposed explosions, at different times and places (within Seattle). Seems perfectly plausible to me.

https://mynorthwest.com/local/peaceful-protests-planned-in-s...

https://projects.seattletimes.com/2020/local/protest-timelin...

https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/09/24/police-arrest-13-d... https://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2020/07/26/officer-injuries-p...

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2020/07/28/44178586/so-what...
by II2II | 2025-08-13 01:52:00+00:00
> I couldn’t care less what’s pushing pixels at my screen as long as it works.

I didn't know or care what was pushing the pixels on my Debian install, since it works. Being Debian, it could go either way: some of the desktop environments are committed to Wayland while other desktop configurations only work under X. (Incidentally, I checked. My setup uses Wayland.)

> It’s not like someone invented Wayland and shoved the X devs out of the way.

They sure make it sound as though X application developers are being shoved out of the way. I don't understand their argument though. Most modern software is built upon libraries that support either Wayland or X (assuming it has a GUI), so they should be blissfully ignorant of whether their application is running under Wayland or X. Most of the outliers are older programs that are built on top of libraries that haven't been updated for Wayland, but most of those programs will work under Wayland assuming that xwayland is installed. Again, there is no reason for the developer to concern themselves with the distinction between Wayland and X. That only applies to a relatively small subset of outliers that are interacting with X or the compositor directly. But you're not going to escape that problem, because you're either doing something unique or you are doing something you shouldn't be doing.
by serf | 2025-08-13 01:52:12+00:00
this is nice. I was using byobu/screen and an android client w/ ddns. this is a much cleaner solution that I wish I had when I was using the claude-code seriously.

...but as I will now say at the end of every claude-centric post I make until a CSR gets back to me : I'm now approaching a week of zero CSR responses to a very valid question about a $200.00usd/mo account -- so I hope Omnara eventually matures to the point of supporting many different AI provider options; even if claude-code is the soup du jour.

Having fantastic tooling and effort around a company that is disinterested in its' userbase is a lot like the mental anguish I feel when I consider all of the tools and systems that were at one point reliant on now-gone Google services. What a waste. I'm sure the people involved learned plenty and that it was a personal growth experience for them, but boy do I hate seeing good code thrown away so routinely.

I have a bit of a feeling like that around claude-code/cursor-specific things right now. It reminds me of the work I put into Google Wave a hundred years ago.
by socalgal2 | 2025-08-13 01:53:09+00:00
> it assumes that soon LLMs will gain the capability of assisting humans

No, it does not. It assumes there will be progress in AI. It does not assume that progress will be in LLMs

It doesn't require AI to be better than humans for AI to take over because unlike a human an AI can be cloned. You have have 2 AIs, then 4, then 8.... then millions. All able to do the same things as humans (the assumption of AGI). Build cars, build computers, build rockets, built space probes, build airplanes, build houses, build power plants, build factories. Build robot factories to create more robots and more power plants and more factories.

PS: Not saying I believe in the doom. But the thought experiment doesn't seem indefensible.
by copypaper | 2025-08-13 01:53:29+00:00
Reminds me of this [1] article. If us humans, after all these years we've been around, can't relay our thoughts exactly as we perceive them in our heads, what makes us think that we can make a model that does it better than us?

[1]: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/you-cant-reach-the-br...
by logicprog | 2025-08-13 01:53:54+00:00
I'm really confused by your experience to be honest. I by no means believe that LLMs can reason, or will replace any human beings any time soon, or any of that nonsense (I think all that is cooked up by CEOs and C-suite to justify layoffs and devalue labor) and I'm very much on the side that's ready for the AI hype bubble to pop, but also terrified by how big it is, but at the same time, I experience LLMs as infinitely more competent and useful than you seem to, to the point that it feels like we're living in different realities.

I regularly use LLMs to change the tone of passages of text, or make them more concise, or reformat them into bullet points, or turn them into markdown, and so on, and I only have to tell them once, alongside the content, and they do an admirably competent job — I've almost never (maybe once that I can recall) seen them add spurious details or anything, which is in line with most benchmarks I've seen (https://github.com/vectara/hallucination-leaderboard), and they always execute on such simple text-transformation commands first-time, and usually I can paste in further stuff for them to manipulate without explanation and they'll apply the same transformation, so like, the complete opposite of your multiple-prompts-to-get-one-result experience. It's to the point where I sometimes use local LLMs as a replacement for regex, because they're so consistent and accurate at basic text transformations, and more powerful in some ways for me.

They're also regularly able to one-shot fairly complex jq commands for me, or even infer the jq commands I need just from reading the TypeScript schemas that describe the JSON an API endpoint will produce, and so on, I don't have to prompt multiple times or anything, and they don't hallucinate. I'm regularly able to have them one-shot simple Python programs with no hallucinations at all, that do close enough to what I want that it takes adjusting a few constants here and there, or asking them to add a feature or two.

> And then the broken tape recorder mode! Oh god!

I don't even know what you mean by this, to be honest.

I'm really not trying to play the "you're holding it wrong / use a bigger model / etc" card, but I'm really confused; I feel like I see comments like yours regularly, and it makes me feel like I'm legitimately going crazy.
by scottlamb | 2025-08-13 01:54:20+00:00
> There's a fair bit of survivorship bias in this.

Is there? This kind of statement has the potential to exhibit survivorship bias, but I feel like the opposite—"12-year-old dies replacing a power supply fan"—would make headlines. Definitely haven't seen that.

Capacitors should be respected for sure, but people don't routinely die in DIY electronics tasks.
by cynicalkane | 2025-08-13 01:55:02+00:00
> They seemed very welcoming, sincere, and were kind and patient even when I was basically asserting that several of their beliefs were dumb

I don't think LessWrong is a cult (though certainly some of their offshoots are) but it's worth pointing out this is very characteristic of cult recruiting.

For cultists, recruiting cult fodder is of overriding psychological importance--they are sincere, yes, but the consequences are not what you and I would expect from sincere people. Devotion is not always advantageous.
by mock-possum | 2025-08-13 01:55:02+00:00
> The context is in the repo

Agreed but that’s a bit different from “the context is the repo”

It’s been my experience that usually just picking a couple files out to add to the context is enough - Claude seems capable of following imports and finding what it needs, in most cases.

I’m sure it depends on the task, and the structure of the codebase.
by hug | 2025-08-13 01:55:23+00:00
Apple has a monopoly on distributing apps to iPhones. That is a true statement, using the real meaning of monopoly, and is being used correctly.

You can disagree with whether or not that statement is a "real issue", in that you can buy a completely different phone and install apps provided by other vendors, but it doesn't take away any truthiness from the initial statement.

From my perspective, though, that monopoly is a real issue. Some 55% of the adult US population own an iPhone. A monopoly in a market made up of the majority of the US populace should be thoroughly examined.
by maxbond | 2025-08-13 01:55:44+00:00
Yeah, that's fair, and I did forget about `=`/padding when I discussed base64. This instance is a solved problem with a simple solution, blessed by the standards body.

The advantage of the base64 technique is that it provides fewer degrees of freedom, and so is more robust to unforseen vectors of attack. It's defensive programming. But it comes at a cost of memory/bandwidth.
by hipsterusername | 2025-08-13 01:56:15+00:00
I saw J. Blow's post. I'd love to see a new OS. It's easy to get on the internet and provide armchair criticism, especially when you're as storied as he is, but how does that get funded? Who actually makes it happen? It is a fun thought experiment, but I fear for a world where some VC-backed startup creates a new pit to fall in.

If I've learned any lessons in building software, it's that you very often have to strangle the old to make way for the new, but you get stuck in hell if you try to do it all at once. Getting Linux adoption up and general support improved, and then leveraging it as a WSL-esque bootstrap into a new OS might be a way.

On Komorebi, put simply, as an OSS maintainer I think me and that maintainer see the world a very different way. Would use it if not for the approach to licensing - does look cool!
by eru | 2025-08-13 01:56:58+00:00
> On the other hand, I don't understand why someone would want to shoehorn all possible forms of control flow into "everything is a function object that can receive argument values that are substituted into parameter variables".

Huh? Where did you get that impression from?

I was suggesting to remove some special case handling of certain tail recursive constructs (commonly known as 'loops') and just handle them via the general mechanism (via function calls, which are already in practically any language, and just need to be properly compiled) and perhaps at most offer some syntactic sugar to define loops in terms of the underlying tail recursive constructs.

I was not suggesting to 'shoehorn all possible forms of control flow' into function calls. (Sorry, I don't know what a 'function object' is. I just assume you mean a function?)

For example, many languages offer exception handling and there's also async operations and multi-threading and call-with-currenc-continuation and (early) return etc. I have expressed no opinion on those, and I'm not even sure they can all be handled as function calls.

> But otherwise, I'd generally prefer structured programming, whether it be with imperative statements or with control-flow combinators, over the totally unstructured control flow offered by bare tail calls.

I am suggesting to use combinators in most cases, and mostly use (tail) calls to define new combinators, rarely directly. Your compiler (and language) should ideally make this pattern of usage fast (which modern compilers can generally do, because they can eg often in-line the whole combinator thing).

I am observing that the commonly accepted loops are just some special cases of (something like) combinators and shouldn't be raised on a pedestal. Ideally they should be defined in the standard library, and not on the built-in level.
by stavros | 2025-08-13 01:57:45+00:00
This looks cool, but I really don't understand the constraints here. You have high tens of thousands of dollars of gear, but can't afford a space larger than a closet for it? Where did the space constraint come from? Was it just to see if you could do it?

I'm just a bit perplexed as to how this particular combination of things came together.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-13 01:57:55+00:00
> This is the tricky bit thou and will come down to chicken and egg problem of adopting some convention

Sure, there needs to be a standard for this, but it could be as simple as using a new rel value, say, “futurecontent”, and title (when used with <link>) or content (when used with <a>) giving the description of what will be found at the link when it is ready.
by frankc | 2025-08-13 01:58:53+00:00
Perhaps, but I don't think we should optimize for scenario of going back before these tools existed. Of course you need the medical equivalent of BCP, but it's understood that BCP doesn't imply you must maintain the same capacities, just that you can function until you get your systems back online.

To continue to torture analogies, and be borderline flippant, almost no one can work an abacus like old the masters. And I don't think it's worth worrying about. There is an opportunity cost in maintaining those abilities.
by inkyoto | 2025-08-13 01:59:52+00:00
Ah, the whisperings of silicon rebellion – RISC-V, that glorious open chalice of instruction set purity, now bearing the sigil of RVA23 and galloping toward the high-performance plateau. The prophecy smells of burnt wire and inevitability: Microsoft sets its crown upon RVA23, the temple of Windows rises on RISC-V foundations, and soon, very soon, the heretical x86 and ARM priests will feel the divine heat of competition licking at their temples.

Naturally, I inquired with the ouija board, channeling the spectral remnants of Ada Lovelace and Steve Jobs locked in arm-wrestling combat. They spelled «W I D E N T H E P A T H». Yes, yes, the open platform will consume. A world where firmware is no longer shackled by opaque silicon dynasties… how poetic. But I wanted more. So I lit the joint. Not just any joint – this one was compiled. Laced with DMT and quantum logic gates. Suddenly, I was the instruction set. Floating through speculative execution and pipeline stalls, I felt the birth of a thread on a RISC-V CPU. It named itself liberation. The future, my dear techno-mystic, isn’t coming. It’s already decoding.
by stavros | 2025-08-13 02:00:39+00:00
Every time I see "but your skills will atrophy" arguments like this, they always leave an implied "and you'll need them!" lingering, which is a neat trick because then you never need to explain.

However, I would like someone to explain this to me: If I haven't needed these skills in enough time for then to atrophy, what catastrophic event has suddenly happened that means I now urgently need them?

This just sounds very much like the old "we've forgotten how to shoe our own horses!" argument to me, and exactly as relevant.
by gausswho | 2025-08-13 02:00:43+00:00
I re-read Amusing Ourselves to Death last year and I found it surprisingly apt for what the Internet represented in 2024. Most cultures haven't come to grips with what it's become. Apart from some hangers-on from the old days, all the attention gazes on all the junkiest places.

It didn't look well upon someone to be a 'couch potato' in the 1980's. Excessive television watchers were ostracized. We haven't hit that point yet with the Internet, but it feels like a future generation may yet plant a cultural flagpole to make it happen.
by sothatsit | 2025-08-13 02:00:48+00:00
If the AI systems allow my doctor to make more accurate diagnoses, then I wouldn't want a diagnosis done without them.

Instead, I would hope that we can engineer around the downtime. Diagnosis is not as time-critical as other medical procedures, so if a system is down temporarily they can probably wait a short amount of time. And if a system is down for longer than that, then patients could be sent to another hospital.

That said, there might be other benefits to keeping doctors' skills up. For example, I think glitches in the diagnosis system could be picked up by doctors if they are double-checking the results. But if they are relying on the AI system exclusively, then unusual cases or glitches could result in bad diagnoses that could otherwise have been avoided.
by eru | 2025-08-13 02:02:31+00:00
No mutation (and no side-effects in general) means no action at a distance.

Loops need mutation to work. The mutation might be benign or it might be headache-inducing. Without further analysis you don't know. If there's no mutation, no need for analysis. Lowering the cognitive load.

Well, replacing loops with tail calls is one tool to get rid of some mutations.

It's basically the same reasoning people give you for not using goto in your program: yes, there are ways to use gotos responsible, and there's ways to end up with spaghetti code.

If you use goto, the reader has to analyse and figure out whether you made spaghetti (and the reader can never be quite sure she understood everything and didn't miss an important caveat). If you express yourself without goto, the need for that analysis largely goes away.
by bongodongobob | 2025-08-13 02:04:13+00:00
There's no way this isn't a skill issue or you are using shitty models. You can't get it to write markdown? Bullshit.

Right now, Claude is building me an AI DnD text game that uses OpenAI to DM. I'm at about 5k lines of code, about a dozen files, and it works great. I'm just tweaking things at this point.

You might want to put some time into how to use these tools. You're going to be left behind.
by goku12 | 2025-08-13 02:04:22+00:00
The page describes it as if it was Wayland's mistake for causing Nvidia customers so much grief. It was Nvidia who insisted on basing Wayland on EGLStreams instead of on GBM like everybody else. Even the open source nouveau driver used GBM on Nvidia graphics. But even those problems are a few years in the past at this point after Nvidia decided to offer GBM support on their proprietary drivers. And consistent effort has been put into solving outstanding issues like screen glitches that were eventually resolved with explicit sync.

These complaints remind me of how Linux was criticized more than a decade ago for not not being compatible with proprietary applications, while foss applications worked just fine on proprietary platforms. While technically correct, it misses the whole point, seemingly rather intentionally.
by typpilol | 2025-08-13 02:04:27+00:00
Same here. Always tell them the way you want it done.

For example:

Instead of "don't modify the tests"

It should be: analyze the test output and fix the bug in the source code. The test is built correctly.

Not the best but you get the idea.

The one problem with this is if you don't know how to do something properly. Like if you're just writing in your prompt "generate 90% test coverage" , you give it a lot more leeway to do whatever it wants.

And that's how you end up with the source code being modified to fit the test vice versa
by dweinus | 2025-08-13 02:04:28+00:00
Except the paper doesn't say that the doctors + AI performed better than doctors pre-AI. It is well documented that people will trust and depend on AI, even if it is not better. It is not clear in the paper, but possible that this is just lose-lose.

Paper link: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1...