MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-08-11 00:25:47+00:00
I'm a bit surprised that you're surprised by my argument given your awareness of a similar argument in history (which happened quite a few times).

It is true that the high-level languages "won out", and now even maybe scripting languages (Python is incredibly popular), but that also doesn't mean the concerns of the time were unwarranted. Many of those concerns did come true. Which, honestly, I don't think anyone was arguing that we couldn't continue moving forward with high level languages, but rather than we'll be able to write code faster but at the expense of hardware and that this can lead to enshitification. Though no one used that exact term. I'm not convinced most professional software isn't extremely resource inefficient and there isn't a lot of enshitification.

> Paul Graham was moved to write "Beating the Averages"

I mean look at the article

This is the same argument you tend to hear for learning Latin. It won't get you a job... but it will improve your mind, and make you a better writer in languages you do want to use, like English.

The reason learning Latin helps with English is because you start to learn underlying structures. It would still benefit your English skills even if people spoke it regularly. These are orthogonal properties. It benefited Graham because it was so powerful. But that power is getting you to think with lambda calculus.

I know Lisp is a high level language, but there is more to all of this than such a simple reduction. I mean C and C++ are high level programming languages. Even Python was mentioned in that article! So if your takeaway from it was that high level languages are the winners then I think you've missed most of the story.

Though I find his article starts to lose coherence as it moves into The Blub Paradox. There's no real definition of "power" and he weirdly is conflating it with how high level a language is. Which plenty of scripting languages like Python and Perl were available at that time. So if he's saying that Lisp was the most powerful, then it isn't about how "high" level the language is, which is the metaphor he moves into. It's so weird to hear his argument about the Blub programmer looking "up" the power continuum and thinking those languages are just as powerful. I think a lot of people think other languages are more powerful than the ones they usually write it (or even know). Hell, it is usually the driving feature to learn a language.

The real reason no one writes in Lisp was already answered. No one understands it. And people will make compromises to ensure they can understand one another. This also is a self-reinforcing paradigm though...
by xrd | 2025-08-11 00:25:47+00:00
Totally agree.

And, I'm in the process of divorcing. I want them to have the psychological safety that they can call their mom when they need to.

Kids are all about trying to establish some kind of control in their lives. My son especially says "I'm texting mom!!!" at 10 pm. I want to provide him the access to reach his mom if he really needs to, but avoid him staring at a screen, which is what he is really trying to do in between waiting for the text from his mom.

I know there are parental controls that would help with this kind of thing. That requires both parents are aligned on the way those controls are used. It isn't that simple in my case.
by omneity | 2025-08-11 00:26:00+00:00
Qwen3 32B is a dense model, it uses all its parameters all the time. GPT OSS 20B is a sparse MoE model. This means it only uses a fraction (3.6B) at a time. It’s a tradeoff that makes it faster to run than a dense 20B model and much smarter than a 3.6B one.

In practice the fairest comparison would be to a dense ~8B model. Qwen Coder 30B A3B is a good sparse comparison point as well.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-11 00:28:05+00:00
I'm baffled as to why new iPhones and iPads have a settings toggle to only ever charge to max 80%, but Apple hasn't brought the same setting to new Macs, so you still need a third party tool like this. Especially after unifying the Settings app!

Also this tool (or Al Dente) still isn't perfect -- if you shut your Mac off for any reason while keeping it plugged in, it will immediately charge back up to 100%. The third party charge limit only limits charging when the Mac is on or sleeping, not off entirely. (Granted, not many people turn their Macs entirely off these days.) So while I love the third party solutions, a native Apple solution would be even more reliable (plus the built-in Apple solution on iOS automatically charges to 100% occasionally just to keep the battery level accurate -- it's pretty smart).
by kibwen | 2025-08-11 00:28:19+00:00
No, what's authoritarian is an unavoidable insurance scheme that ignores the concept of moral hazard. In fact, I am all for insurance, it's extremely efficient at large and an institution as old as humanity itself, but if you don't deal with moral hazard then the wheels come off the engine. If I'm in an insurance pool with a smoker and they break their leg, that's fine. If I'm in an insurance pool with a smoker and they get lung cancer, they better be paying more than me. Some things are decisions, not fate, and people need to be willing to bear the cost of their decisions. To the point, if that Floridian's house burns down or that Californian's house floods then that's fine; vice versa is the problem.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-08-11 00:30:33+00:00
Flawless is interesting.

It can't work in the general case because replaying a sequence of syscalls is not sufficient to put the machine back in the same state as it was last time. E.g. second time around open behaves differently so you need to follow the error handling.

However sometimes that approach would work. I wonder how wide the area of effective application is. It might be wide enough to be very useful. The all or nothing database transaction model fits it well.
by selcuka | 2025-08-11 00:30:35+00:00
> GPT OSS 20B is a sparse MoE model. This means it only uses a fraction (3.6B) at a time.

They compared it to GPT OSS 120B, which activates 5.1B parameters per token. Given the size of the model it's more than fair to compare it to Qwen3 32B.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-11 00:31:42+00:00
The US spends about USD$4.5B per year on US troops and facilities based in South Korea.

And funded what looks like ~USD$35B in post-war economic assistance. (Plus other UN funding)

For that, South Korea went from being devastated by 2 wars to around the 13th largest economy in the world. Not a bad return.

China and Russia were welcome to invest in North Korea...
by yial | 2025-08-11 00:32:46+00:00
This is overall a pretty good strategy.

I’ve done something similar - usually buying tools only when I need them, or when I find something I’ve been thinking about at a great deal used.

I do periodically however take time to straighten, arrange, and fix workflow / storage issues.

(This became important when I purchased at auction from a hardware store closing down 30+ 3 foot tall of bins of hardware - the exact ones used for display in the store - still filled ).
by skissane | 2025-08-11 00:34:52+00:00
> There is nothing wrong with using this calling convention, except for those specific functions that need to have a variable number of arguments

I think it is a big pity that contemporary mainstream x86[-64] calling conventions (both Windows and the SysV ABI used by Linux-and almost everybody else) don’t pass the argument count in a register for varargs functions. This means there is no generic way for a varargs function to know how many arguments it was called with - some functions use a sentinel value (often NULL), for some one of the arguments contains an embedded DSL you need to parse (e.g. printf and friends). Using obtuse preprocessor magic you can make a macro with the same name as your function which automatically passes its argument count as a parameter-but that is rarely actually done.

OpenVMS calling convention-including the modified version of SysV ABI which the OpenVMS x86-64 port uses-passes the argument count of varargs function calls in a register (eax), which is then available using the va_count macro. I don’t know why Windows/Linux/etc didn’t copy this idea, I wish they had - but it is too late now.
by godelski | 2025-08-11 00:35:10+00:00
> even if the code says something like `total /= 0`

In what context would this not be wrong?

I mean... it might run or compile but our best case scenario is what, javascript where it returns infinity? But I'd certainly take issue with any program where I saw an explicit division by zero. If you were just trying to create an infinity there's got to be a good explanation for doing it that way.
by avidiax | 2025-08-11 00:37:11+00:00
> It's reasonable to expect people to know how to use their tools well.

This shows the core of the flaw in the argument.

"The tool is great. If the result is not perfect, it is the user to blame."

It's unfalsifiable. The LLM can provide terrible results for reasonable prompts, but the response is never that LLMs are limited or have flaws, but that the user needs to prompt better or try again with a better LLM next week.

And more importantly, this is for the good case where the user has the discernment and motivation to know that the result is bad.

There are going to be lots of bad outputs slipping past human screeners, and many in the AI crowd will say "the prompt was bad", or "that model is obsolete, new models are better" ad infinitum.

This isn't to say that we won't get LLMs that produce great output with imperfect prompts eventually. It just won't be achieved by blaming the user rather than openly discussing the limitations and working through them.
by cnst | 2025-08-11 00:38:01+00:00
We've literally had configurable charge levels on ThinkPads since the time they were still owned by IBM over 20 years ago, yet Apple still can't figure out to provide such an option 20 years later?

Their whole ML thing is super annoying. Basically, it means you can never disconnect your Mac from your USB-C monitor, lest it immediately charge to 100% upon a reconnect, and discharge back to 80% only a few days after keeping it at 100%.
by agentictime | 2025-08-11 00:38:15+00:00
I get you. I felt it too several months ago (It hit me the most when a friend showed me lovable). My grandpa once told me about the ice makers in his hometown who used to haul huge blocks of ice to customers. When home refrigerators arrived, they protested against them, warning they would destroy their trade. Some changes are unstoppable. You can fight the current or ride it, but there’s room to succeed either way
by LeoPanthera | 2025-08-11 00:38:30+00:00
A huge advantage of AlDente over this is the "sailing" feature. I have mine configured to stop charging at 80%, but then only start charging again when it drops to 50%. It's ideal for preventing lots of very short charging sessions. (This is also an ideal pattern for charging EVs.)

It also has a "calibrate" feature which goes through a 100 -> 10 -> 100 cycle which teaches the battery firmware what the actual capacity is now. Useful to run every month or two.

My Air battery is three years old and has 99% health because of using these features.
Show HN: TinyExperiments – prototype for curiosity-driven personal experiments
by pmbuilder | 2025-08-11 00:38:32+00:00
I discovered the TinyExperiments idea while listening to a podcast interview and it immediately clicked for me: use curiosity to run tiny, low-stakes experiments about your life.

I built a simple prototype to validate the concept before building it fully: - One-tap daily yes/no tracking - Quick PMN reflections (Plus/Minus/Next) - 7/21/30-day “experiment” framing to learn what actually works

Would love feedback from HN: - Does the curiosity-first framing resonate? - What’s the smallest v1 you’d actually try for 7 days?

Early access (email only) on the link above.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-08-11 00:41:25+00:00
Hashtables keyed off the address of objects would be an example.

On multiple runs, malloc gives out different addresses (thanks to threads or security concerns) which means things end up in different slots in the table. Then you iterate through it in memory order and you're seeing objects in non-deterministic order, which you do things with.

Embedding file paths / timestamps / git shas and similar was popular for a while too and unhelpful for reproducible builds.
Show HN: The "best" AI over text – prove me wrong
by hrishi98 | 2025-08-11 00:41:25+00:00
We built Festa — an AI that coordinates entire events over SMS in real time.

We’re targeting weddings first, but it works for any large gathering. Guests think they’re texting a human, but it’s 100% AI.

It answers questions, chases RSVPs, coordinates vendors, sends reminders… all instantly.

We think it’s the best AI over text in the world. If you think yours is better — or you can make ours fail — try it out on our landing page.

Post your results and feedback here — I’m curious what you throw at it.

Also just joined X to share more behind-the-scenes on building Festa: https://x.com/thekevinqi
by liamdgray | 2025-08-11 00:41:57+00:00
Abstract: "Current automated systems have crucial limitations that need to be addressed before artificial intelligence can reach human-like levels and bring new technological revolutions. Among others, our societies still lack level-5 self driving cars, domestic robots, and virtual assistants that learn reliable world models, reason, and plan complex action sequences. In these notes, we summarize the main ideas behind the architecture of autonomous intelligence of the future proposed by Yann LeCun. In particular, we introduce energy-based and latent variable models and combine their advantages in the building block of LeCun’s proposal, that is, in the hierarchical joint-embedding predictive architecture."
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-08-11 00:43:33+00:00
The things which look like "easy" AI problems are actually harder than they seem. There are no clean abstractions here, if you don't know the math you are kinda hosed doing something as simple as fine tuning an LLM for some specific use case, or even building a good application. For people who a really actually good, there are millions of opportunities outside doing "foundation" level work.
by cnst | 2025-08-11 00:43:34+00:00
macOS is unreliable period; mine gets charged to 100% immediately after a power outage of any kind, e.g., re-arranging the monitor/laptop, or an actual power outage.

Obviously, it'd be nice if it knew of power outages upfront, but charging to 100% after one, is kinda pointless.

Then it stays at 100% for several days, until discharging to 80% several days later.

It's supposed to be smart, but instead it causes the user to alter their own behaviour, e.g., not disconnect the USB-C when rearranging the desk, even if disconnecting would be far more convenient when doing a cleanup or re-arranging furniture.

I miss the time when Apple used to give you choices…
by saulpw | 2025-08-11 00:43:49+00:00
A sword can kill one person at a time. A gun can kill 10 people at a time. A bomb can kill a hundred people. A nuclear bomb can kill thousands.

You can certainly commit mass slaughter with less technology. But then you need either a) more people to do the slaughtering, or b) more time. Technology makes it possible for a few people to slaughter many people in very little time.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-08-11 00:44:03+00:00
Maybe 1 in 10 million? What do you think the numerator in denominator are here? I'm guessing less than a hundred organizations with a billion dollars in reserve.

There are less than 2,000 us companies with a billion dollar market cap, out of ~40 million companies.

I expect the reserves would be a substantially less than that. Maybe somewhere in the ballpark of low triple digit organizations with a billion+ dollar reserve. Maybe 200 nationally?
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-11 00:44:30+00:00
> He’s looking forward to higher level coursework but dreading the intro classes.

A late addition. Your son should test out of those classes given your description of his skills. Alternatively, he should talk to his advisor and seek to skip lower level courses. He'll still need the same number of credits, but I did this to get out of three lower level math and CS courses that I already had down. Some advisors are more amenable to this than others, though.
by beala | 2025-08-11 00:45:14+00:00
Geerling benchmarked LLM performance on the Framework Desktop and the results look pretty lackluster to me. First, the software seems really immature. He couldn't get ROCm or the NPU working. When he finally got the iGPU working with Vulkan, he could only generate 5 tok/sec with Llama 3.1 70b (40 GB model). That's intolerably slow for anything interactive like coding or chatting imo, but I suppose that's a matter of opinion.

https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/21
by mockingloris | 2025-08-11 00:45:41+00:00
This makes sense. I find that after 15 to 20 iterations, I get better understanding of what is being done and possible simplifications.

I then manually declare some functions, JSDoc comments for the return types, imports and stop halfway. By then the agent is able to think, ha!, you plan to replace all the api calls to this composable under the so and so namespace.

It's iterations and context. I don't use them for everything but I find that they help when my brain bandwidth begins to lag or I just need a boilerplate code before engineering specific use cases.

└── Dey well
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-11 00:45:41+00:00
I was talking with a historian of medicine who surprised me with the observation that the age of cures was past, and that we lived in the age of management. Antibiotics gave us cures, and vaccines eradicated diseases, but those advances had their limits: there is no penicillin for viruses or cancer. Advances since the mid-twentieth century have been more about managing conditions, which is much more profitable. Cure syphilis, and the patient goes away happy; treat AIDS, and the patient will keep buying more treatments as long as he lives.
by rcxdude | 2025-08-11 00:45:51+00:00
It seems like the main issue is BTRFS has some sharp edges: it's possible to use it in a solid way, but there's enough situations you can put it in where it completely fails that it's really hard to be confident deploying it unless you're really going to be very careful (and, to be fair, for all of ZFS's reputation, it also has a few sharp edges, but they seem to be more corner cases with certain combinations of features as opposed to pretty common use-cases. Heck, btrfs has had a corruption bug in the last two linux releases that's only just being fixed).
by bevhill | 2025-08-11 00:47:22+00:00
Let's think about this. You say that Texas and Florida are "donors" in the same way as California is. But what do those states do? Take Texas. Its main industry by far is oil and gas -- an extractive and polluting industry, and one that causes pollution far and wide wherever the products are used. Any money that Texas has is paid for by current and future suffering, by causing the very climate change they say doesn't happen.

Florida is a tourist state. Everyone loves Disney and the beach, but any money from tourism is just brought in from somewhere else. Florida's tourism industry is also extractive, and tourist travel also causes untold climate damage.

But California? We have agriculture. We have software. We have logistics -- everything in your house probably came through Long Beach and on our highways. We even have our own Disney so we don't have to fly to yours. California's industries aren't extractive. They're productive. And we're careful to minimize or eliminate the externalities of our industries while we work to create the things you use every day. In many ways, California is America. Without us, the country would shrink and shrivel day by day until you've extracted all the good and left everyone else nothing.
by sgentle | 2025-08-11 00:48:49+00:00
When you say "allow"... what exactly do you imagine happening if Yale's linguistic department forbids people from using English in certain ways?

Or is this more of a federal government thing? Grammar Force as the seventh branch of the US Military? What about other countries... are we thinking NATO or UN? Either way, gonna be tough to try and convince the Brits that US English is the correct one, since we didn't exactly get permission from them in the first place.
by skeledrew | 2025-08-11 00:49:25+00:00
Agree in general with most of the points, except

> but because I know you and I get by with less.

Actually we got far more data and training than any LLM. We've been gathering and processing sensory data every second at least since birth (more processing than gathering when asleep), and are only really considered fully intelligent in our late teens to mid-20s.
by dang | 2025-08-11 00:51:42+00:00
The paper itself has been discussed a few times:

An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction (2006) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29123715 - Nov 2021 (10 comments)

An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction (2006) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20577660 - July 2019 (5 comments)

An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction (2006) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13207441 - Dec 2016 (19 comments)

An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction (2006) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10785164 - Dec 2015 (13 comments)

Writing a Compiler in 24 Small Steps [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1652623 - Sept 2010 (16 comments)

An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408241 - June 2010 (18 comments)

(and also in comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)
by plorkyeran | 2025-08-11 00:52:02+00:00
In 2011 I spent a month in Latvia and while no one ever outright said that they wished the USSR had not fallen, I heard a lot of stories about how things got a lot worse in the short term and had only recently recovered. They were mostly centered around how Latvia’s economy was very intertwined with things on the east side of the border and trade became much more complicated (and supplying make-work Soviet factories was suddenly not viable).

I suspect the fact that I spent the entire time with ethnic Russians played a role in this, as it sounded like the Latvians had been second-class citizens in their own country.
by qkeast | 2025-08-11 00:52:43+00:00
Using curved, matching quotation marks is typographic design and style, as is using hyphens, en, and em dashes correctly in context. Many tools will automatically use the correct typographic symbols in context in the same way they’ll automatically insert periods and spaces in response to double-spacing. And even setting that aside—typographic style is a long-standing craft of design. Why would we want to let LLMs take that away from us?
by tom_m | 2025-08-11 00:52:52+00:00
I don't know, start with a lower salary. I did. Ok, that was like nearly 20 years ago, but it was in Manhattan. It wasn't cheap. Stop trying to work at stupid FAANG companies. I can't understand why anyone would want to work at those places. You learn nothing because there's too many people. On the other side of the fence, the pressure cooker startups adopting those insane 12 hour 6 work day weeks are also bad.

So I get it, there's not much left...but expecting six figures for your first job is crazy.