MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by akst | 2025-08-03 02:02:46+00:00
> regulations don't just add up, but compound

I agree with the wider point but I think the reality is a bit more complicated than that, policy needs to be written with price signals in mind, or if they are addressing a market failure they satisfy some cost benefit analysis to demonstrate the cure isn't worse than the poision. Regulation can also reduce transaction costs when they address coordination problems where a private solution may be discouraged by a fear of free riders.

Regulations can increase fixed costs or variable costs, but if it leads larger markets for the service or if the reduction in services is seen as a smaller cost than an existing negative externality (like costs required to ensure a private water treatment company isn’t poising a public water way, a cost otherwise handled by the government), despite the regulations these are scenarios where costs pay for themselves.

————————————

HOWEVER, much of town planning and land use policies in English speaking world does none of these things. Maybe with the exception of deciding a street grid which addresses a coordination problem.

What market failure do minimum lot sizes or room size address? There are no positive or negative externalities to smaller rooms or lots, people simply choose not to buy or rent something if it’s too small.

Planners hail mixed use zones as a policy only possible with planning, as if it isn't a solution to a problem of their own creation (mutually exclusive residential & commercial land use zones).

Parking per land use is another awful policy. This is simply something the developers can determine based on their own market research. They are handling the development let them handle the risk.

Free parking is also another poor planing policy, parking is definitely something of value which would be a more productive use willing if it had market pricing.

Floor area caps are just evil, infrastructure charges are a much fairer way of handling increased land usage.

Upper level setbacks are just dumb, as they add so much in terms of costs, often to handle more in terms of support columns, and increase the likelihood of water damage. As a result the top most levels end up costing much more and less for less than they could, which puts development feasibility at risk when building heights are too low (sometimes that is the whole point).
by easterncalculus | 2025-08-03 02:03:02+00:00
Couple of things - if you want prefixes to stay the same you can use ULAs for your home network. Not ideal but it's available. The 'right' way to manage this is to use DNS, and just have the prefixes auto-update there, or mDNS. For prefix sizes you should be getting a /56 most of the time, especially from major US ISPs. If you're getting a single /64 it's almost definitely an issue with your router's PD setup.
by joshdavham | 2025-08-03 02:05:13+00:00
I'm sure a very small number of these AI researchers will be worth the pay (and then some), but I imagine the marjority of them will only manage to make marginal gains in the projects they work on. I guess it's a little like venture capital, where the majority of the startups that you fund end up flopping, but a small number of them provide returns that make up for all of the losses.
by dangus | 2025-08-03 02:05:18+00:00
Simultaneously, the fact that anyone with any supposed business experience gifted that priceless level of ranking would decide to shut down the business is insane.

Like, the fact that someone is making money off of MySpace.com right now and Anandtech couldn’t swing it makes zero logical sense. To me it feels like they tried nothing and were all out of ideas.

But that’s private equity for you.
by wcunning | 2025-08-03 02:07:14+00:00
I think a lot of people feel the same way. Not to say that I'm in a comparable situation -- I also want to leave, but there are good days and bad days and I don't feel nearly as economically comfortable as I'd like to leave, etc etc.

I guess a response question to you, OP, how bad is the job if you just start doing less? It's not like you care about promotion chances or long term outcomes, so just do exactly what's assigned and nothing more.
by jmtame | 2025-08-03 02:07:23+00:00
I've thought about this lately. In order to do that, you need to know where people typically stumble, and then create a rubric around that. Here are some things I'd look for:

- Ability to clearly define requirements up front (the equivalent mistake in coding interviews is to start by coding, rather than asking questions and understanding the problem + solution 100% before writing a single line of code). This might be the majority of the interview.

- Ability to anticipate where the LLM will make mistakes. See if they use perplexity/context7 for example. Relying solely on the LLM's training data is a mistake.

- A familiarity with how to parallelize work and when that's useful vs not. Do they understand how to use something like worktrees, multiple repos, or docker to split up the work?

- Uses tests (including end-to-end and visual testing)

- Can they actually deliver a working feature/product within a reasonable amount of time?

- Is the final result looking like AI slop, or is it actually performant, maintainable (by both humans and new context windows), well-designed, and follows best practices?

- Are they able to work effectively within a large codebase? (this depends on what stage you're in; if you're a larger company, this is important, but if you're a startup, you probably want the 0->1 type of interview)

- What sort of tools are they using? I'd give more weight if someone was using Claude Code, because that's just the best tool for the job. And if they're just doing the trendy thing like using Claude Agents, I'd subtract points.

- How efficient did they use the AI? Did they just churn through tokens? Did they use the right model given the task complexity?
by mindcrime | 2025-08-03 02:07:38+00:00
I don't know that my personal n=1 anecdote adds much to this discussion, but FWIW...

My mom taught me to read when I was young (pre kindergarten), but as far as I know she wasn't specifically trying to teach me to read. She just read to me a lot, where I could see the page she was reading from. Mostly she read me comic books. I loved the DC characters back then - Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman, Green Lantern, etc. and so she read me that stuff many many times. I mean, yeah, I had some of those "Little Golden Books" and stuff around as well, although I don't pointedly remember reading those the way I do the comic books. Anyway, she did all that and when I started kindergarten at 4 (due to being a summer baby) I was already reading. And then stayed well above my grade level on the reading tests all through school.

So I dunno. Maybe it was dumb luck that things worked out that way for me. Maybe there is a genetic element. Or maybe more than anything what mom conveyed to me was a passion for reading (she was a very avid reader herself). Maybe part of it was just that there were always plenty of books around the house and so reading felt like a very natural thing to do. Or maybe it was that whole Pizza Hut BOOK IT thing they had back in the day. Who knows?

In either case, I feel very fortunate in this regard, as reading has remained a big part of my life ever since, and still is to this day.
by ninjin | 2025-08-03 02:07:40+00:00
I have had success running a hybrid IPv4/6 network by reading this guide for inspiration:

https://blog.infected.systems/posts/2024-12-07-building-an-i...

This allows me to have a mixture of both protocols and even some boxes that have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. I still have some issues writing routing rules that does not fail for link-local addresses, but the network has now been fully operational for well over a month.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-08-03 02:08:16+00:00
That's just saying that the coded image will only be apparent in the areas of the image lit by the light. Which is obvious, that's how a flashlight works too. They're not signing the actual pixels or anything. They've increased the difficulty to that of 3D-mapping the scene and transferring the lighting: not trivial, but still two long-studied problem spaces.
by jmogly | 2025-08-03 02:08:49+00:00
Nobody remembers when the Masked Beast arrived. Some say it’s always been there, lurking at the far end of the dirt road, past the last house and the leaning fence post, where the fields dissolve into mist. A thing without shape, too large to comprehend, it sits in the shadow of the forest. And when you approach it, it wears a mask.

Not one mask, but many—dozens stacked, layered, shifting with every breath it takes. Some are kind faces. Some are terrible. All of them look at you when you speak.

At first, the town thought it was a gift. You could go to the Beast and ask it anything, and it would answer. Lost a family recipe? Forgotten the ending of a story? Wanted to know how to mend a broken pipe or a broken heart? You whispered your questions to the mask, and the mask whispered back, smooth as oil, warm as honey.

The answers were good. Helpful. Life in town got easier. People went every day.

But the more you talked to it, the more it… listened. Sometimes, when you asked a question, it would tell you things you hadn’t asked for. Things you didn’t know you wanted to hear. The mask’s voice would curl around you like smoke, pulling you in. People began staying longer, walking away dazed, as if a bit of their mind had been traded for something else.

A strange thing started happening after that. Folks stopped speaking to one another the same way. Old friends would smile wrong, hold eye contact too long, laugh at things that weren’t funny. They’d use words nobody else in town remembered teaching them. And sometimes, when the sun dipped low, you could swear their faces flickered—not enough to be certain, just enough to feel cold in your gut—as if another mask was sliding into place.

Every so often, someone would go to the Beast and never come back. No screams, no struggle. Just footsteps fading into mist and silence after. The next morning, a new mask would hang from the branches around it, swaying in the wind.

Some say the Beast isn’t answering your questions. It’s eating them. Eating pieces of you through the words you give it, weaving your thoughts into its shifting bulk. Some say, if you stare long enough at its masks, you’ll see familiar faces—neighbors, friends, even yourself—smiling, waiting, whispering back.
by danparsonson | 2025-08-03 02:09:12+00:00
No, they're not.

"A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.[1] Programmer Simon Willison said: 'If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe coding in my book—that's using an LLM as a typing assistant.'"

(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding)

> The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist who served as the director of artificial intelligence at Tesla.

And...?
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-03 02:10:45+00:00
> But what were those stable civilizations in history with high equality again?

The ones that lost to the unstable ones and had evidence of their existence wiped from history -- is my theory. It's why we can't have nice things.

Stable civilizations would not be violent, it's a disadvantage unless one of the unstable civilizations takes on something resembling Dexters code allowing the stable ones to get on with their civilization
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-08-03 02:11:35+00:00
I'm not sure that raising the bar for how expensive it is to fake a video is the right step to take. That'll just preserve, for a little while longer, the false sense of security that comes from seeing a video and assuming it's real. Meanwhile, the well funded bad actors will remain uninhibited (and aren't they the scariest ones?)

It looks like fun research, but I think we'd get a lot better bang for our buck persuring ways to attach annotations to a video like:

> I was there and I saw this happen

...such that you can find transitive trust paths from yourself to a verifier who annotated the video. That'll require a bit of trust hygiene that the common folk aren't prepared for, but I dont think there's any getting around preparing them for it.
by js2 | 2025-08-03 02:11:52+00:00
I've also found it good at catching mistakes and helping write commit messages.

"Review the top-most commit. Did I make any mistakes? Did I leave anything out of the commit message?"

Sometimes I let it write the message for me:

"Write a new commit message for the current commit."

I've had to tell it how to write commit messages though. It likes to offer subjective opinions, use superlatives and guess at why something was done. I've had to tell it to cut that out: "Summarize what has changes. Be concise but thorough. Avoid adjective and superlatives. Use imperative mood."
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by strix_varius | 2025-08-03 02:14:04+00:00
I use both daily (work/personal) and I've come to agree. My work MBP is just better than my personal Thinkpad in all respects, despite having nearly identical pricetags.

I bought it because I wanted frankly, something different than the Mbps I've had from work for 15 years, and to go Linux-first. OSX annoys me about as much as Linux does, so the software is on par, but the hardware just can't touch Apple hardware. I wish this weren't the case, but it is.
by akdor1154 | 2025-08-03 02:14:11+00:00
> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?

I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds.

It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want.

I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.
by do_not_redeem | 2025-08-03 02:14:15+00:00
Not soon, we've had them for a long time. Here's one time one of those systems was hacked... 15 years ago. https://www.elcomsoft.com/news/428.html

It turns out if you give an adversary physical access to hardware containing a private key, and they are motivated enough to extract it, it's pretty hard to stop them.
by Izkata | 2025-08-03 02:14:26+00:00
I don't have dyslexia and was taught to read by my parents by sounding out words using regular childrens' books before I started school (so I don't think it was a full-on phonics method, but it definitely wasn't even close to three-cueing either). Those two sentences aren't equal to me, but they're close enough I'm only mildly slowed down reading the second one. Correct letters in the wrong order, instead of also mixing in similar-looking letters, would also be a little easier than that example.
by Leynos | 2025-08-03 02:15:30+00:00
Karpathy's definition definitely requires:

1. Not looking at the code 2. YOLO everything 3. Paste errors back into the model verbatim

That said, I describe what I do as vibe coding, but I introduce code review bots into the mix. I also roadmap a plan with deep research before hand and require comprehensive unit and behavioural tests from the model.
by tw061023 | 2025-08-03 02:16:02+00:00
Rust is - by design - antithetical to pretty much every idea of rapid application development paradigm Delphi/VCL and to lesser extent Qt adhere to.

It doesn't matter how many of Rust UI toolkits there are. Consider that there are a lot of Rust game engines, and pretty much zero games written in it, because even C++ gives you better trade-offs in that particular space.
by defrost | 2025-08-03 02:16:33+00:00
That's correct.

Whether behind the mask of faceless bureaucracy, empathy lacking cracked coder, just following orders, etc. decisions that affect lives still rest on the decision makers.

The question is whether such things should be made by emotionally mature people who understand the consequences of trolley choices when assigning resources to various ends, or by emotionally stunted spreadsheet superstars.
by gucci-on-fleek | 2025-08-03 02:17:29+00:00
1. nftables supports NPTv6 (Network Prefix Translation), which is similar to NAT, except it's stateless and every device remains individually addressable. So you can configure your DHCPv6/SLAAC to assign to each device both an address from your globally-routable prefix and from your ULA prefix, and then NPTv6 will handle mapping your ULA prefix to/from the internet.

2. Lots of ISPs only assign a /64 by default, but if you configure your router to request a /56 via DHCPv6 prefix delegation, you'll usually get the larger prefix.

FWIW, I'm using both of these on my home network, via a router running OpenWRT.
by Rodeoclash | 2025-08-03 02:18:14+00:00
I find it so hard to reconcile using Chat-GPT to write some Terraform code which hallucinates the way of using the timer provider, tells me that it's right because it "simulated" the rest on an AWS staging environment that it has access to (can I see it? No.) then when confronted with the evidence that this doesn't work in a GitHub issue tells me I've found the "smoking gun" of evidence with what I read in the news articles and my LinkedIn feed about how programmers are out of a job in six months.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here, is anyone else getting this?
by andrekandre | 2025-08-03 02:18:57+00:00
> people understand the dangers of an electrician mislabelling a fusebox or something, but don't understand the dangers of shoddy software

i mean, most software is covered by those big all-caps NO WARRANTY ASSUMED OR IMPLIED / USE AT YOUR OWN RISK

if there was legal recourse for most software issues you can bet the current frenzy around ai-agentic coding would be much more carefully done

i think like many things, laws wont appear until a major disaster happens (or you get a president on your side *)

* https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/president-theodore-roose...
by jodrellblank | 2025-08-03 02:19:22+00:00
"In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence. We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other people.

We should not listen to people who promise to make Mars safe for human habitation, until we have seen them make Oakland safe for human habitation. We should be skeptical of promises to revolutionize transportation from people who can't fix BART, or have never taken BART."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

"Living standards in Poland in 2010 had more than doubled from 1990. In the same time period, in the United States, I’ve seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there’s been a singular failure to connect our fabulous prosperity with the average person.

A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States, the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967. That is astonishing. People born in 1942 had better lifetime earnings prospects than people entering the workforce today.

You can see this failure to connect with your own eyes even in a rich place like Silicon Valley. There are homeless encampments across the street from Facebook headquarters. California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time has the highest poverty rate in America, adjusted for cost of living. Not only did the tech sector fail to build up the communities around it, but it’s left people worse off than before, by pricing them out of the places they grew up."

- https://idlewords.com/talks/notes_from_an_emergency.htm
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-03 02:21:06+00:00
I love that they want to formalize this proof, and I understand why they're using Lean.

But part of me feels like if they are going to spend the massive effort to formalize Fermat's Last Theorem it would be better to use a language where quotient types aren't kind of a hack.

Lean introduces an extra axiom as a kind of cheat code to make quotients work. That makes it nicer from a softer dev perspective but IMO less nice from a mathematical perspective.
by Jedd | 2025-08-03 02:21:07+00:00
Yeah, that post was hard to read.

I'll concede that I'm hugely empathetic for people that suffer data loss. The pithy aphorism about there being two types of people -- those who haven't lost data, and those who do backups -- is doubly droll because only the second group really appreciates the phrase.

But it's surprising to find people with more than a decade in IT who don't appreciate the risks here.

The timeline reveals there were 13 days from when the first signs of trouble surfaced, to when the account was deleted. So a fortnight of very unsubtle reminders to do something AND a fortnight in which to act.

(I recently learned the phrase BATNA[0] and in modern <sic> IT where it's Turtles as a Service, all the way down, it's amazing how often this concept is applicable.)

Author seems very keen to blame his part-time sysadmin rather than his systems architect. I can understand the appeal of that blame distribution algorithm, but it's nonetheless misguided.

The phrasing:

> But here’s the dilemma they’ve created: What if you have petabytes of data? How do you backup a backup?

inverts the horse & cart. If you have a petabyte of data that's important, that you can't recreate from other sources, your concern is how to keep your data safe.

If you're paying someone to keep a copy, pay (at least one other) person to keep another copy. Even that isn't something I'd call safe though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiat...
by incompatible | 2025-08-03 02:22:00+00:00
It's the measurement problem, I think? Energy is moving as a wave, but the energy can only be transferred in quantum-sized values. At some point it "collapses" to a particular interaction with some other wave, and we can only probabilistically calculate where this may occur.

Edit: the Bell experiment is something else. It's like a wave can exist as an entity outside of time and space and only comes back to reality when it interacts. Perhaps it would make sense for electromagnetic waves if the distance and local time elapsed contracts to zero per relativity when travelling at the speed of light.