MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-30 16:36:02+00:00
I like spray and pray, personally, at least on a theoretical level. I've never had to do it myself. But applying to hundreds or thousands of places with more or less the same (honest) resume and letting the employer filter you out seems way more economically efficient than eating the linearly scaling cost of customizing for each position heavily. There's likely all kinds of hidden information the employer has that you don't even after reviewing the position as written, and this puts the Hayekian ball in their court.

An applicant could probably get the best of both worlds by creating a preferred and a fallback tier; fallbacks get the spray and pray, and the preferreds get a customized resume.
by wongarsu | 2025-08-30 16:37:02+00:00
If it compiles on my machine then the library and all called methods exist and are not hallucinated. If it runs on my machine then the called external APIs exist and are not hallucinated

That obviously does not mean that it's good software. That's why the rest of my comment exists. But "AI is hallucinating libraries/APIs" is something that can be trivially solved with good software practices from the 00s, and that the AI can resolve by itself using those techniques. It's annoying for autocomplete AI, but for agents it's a non-issue
by shagie | 2025-08-30 16:37:26+00:00
> And the only way to prevent it from becoming a duty is to accept that people own their own mistakes.

This tends to be counter to consumer protection laws or data privacy laws.

A company that can be held to strict liability for their actions can be sued (and be found liable) even if they presented that the action is unreasonable or dangerous.

In saying a consumer who buys a 100% "you can do anything on it" device liable for every action that that device takes no matter what initiated that action?

To me, the argument that you should be able to do anything on the device and be held liable for all the actions that device allows is very similar to that of "the maker of the device has no liability for providing a device that can be misused."

If that is the case, then (to me) this would need to be something that would need to be changed by the courts and the laws (and such a company would need to pull completely out of Europe).
by lithocarpus | 2025-08-30 16:37:32+00:00
Humans generally don't interact in person as much with other humans anymore and technology is I think one of the big drivers of this change.

From the article:

"When it comes to sexlessness (“no sex in the last year”) among young adults, the biggest change comes post-2010."

"Between 2010 and 2019, the average time young adults spent with friends in a given week fell by nearly 50%, from 12.8 hours to just 6.5 hours."

No doubt there are other factors too, and all of the factors are entangled together as in any complex system, but I think internet and smartphones is one of the biggest aspects to point to.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-30 16:38:06+00:00
The strategies currently being used did prevent it in 2020. Trump announced that he was going to steal the election, spent 2 straight months focused exclusively on making it happen, sent a mob into Congress to try and force their hand, and none of it worked. The point of the protests and the tweets is to make sure that Republican decisionmakers understand in 2026 and 2028 what enough of them understood then: Trump is not actually very popular, he doesn't embody the will of the American people, and his power fundamentally depends on a critical mass of people who don't like or respect him but acknowledge his democratic legitimacy.
by krisbolton | 2025-08-30 16:38:44+00:00
Top tier state-sponsored actors don't need backdoors, their skill, resources, and persistance mean they can penetrate almost any system. Ascrbing this to mandatory backdoors distracts from the fact we need to improve cyber resilence and build better offense.

Reading the Atlantic Council's recent paper on what the US can do to counter the system China has created which funnels exploits to their government shows how mistatched the West is versus China. Paper here: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/C...
by saltcured | 2025-08-30 16:38:46+00:00
Compare the "realistically" dingy environment of Darkstar to the fancy space airline and orbital hotel sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Have you really looked at the insides of actual craft from NASA, military aircraft, military and commercial ships, or submarines? Purposeful, large facilities like hangars, factories, oil drilling platforms, or refineries? Smaller technical spaces like equipment rooms, scientific research labs, and medical imaging labs?

I think the designers are often imagining future tech spaces derived from these examples rather than luxury ocean liners, hotels, resorts, and executive meeting rooms. It isn't irrational to use those purposefully technical environments as setting for technologically-driven drama.

Star Trek NG was more of the cruise ship or hotel vibe as they tried to efficiently convey their utopian vision. They went with the militaristic or industrial vibe for contrasting environments they encountered in many episodes.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-30 16:39:00+00:00
TL;DR: NO, you won't be getting a pig lung anytime soon.

>However, by 24 hours after the transplant had taken place, severe swelling (edema) was observed, possibly as a result of blood flow being restored to the area of the transplant.

Antibody-mediated rejection damaged the tissue further on days three and six of the experiment.

The result of the damage was primary graft dysfunction, a type of severe lung injury occurring within 72 hours of a transplant, and the leading cause of death in lung transplant patients.

Some recovery was taking place by day nine, but the experiment had run its course.
by medvezhenok | 2025-08-30 16:39:20+00:00
Agreed, there is no way to know the exact degree of differences between the two populations (although any geneticist would reject the notion of primarily unselected genetic drift in the example I described. I specifically outlined strong selective pressures in the environments). But at least we agree that they would not continue to be identical, and that the environmental pressure, over time, would also show up in genetic drift between the populations (there are surprisingly many blank-slaters who would disagree even with this premise).

We have tools in modern science to attempt to differentiate between different underlying components of genetic variation vs environmental variation (identical twin studies, adoption-at-birth studies, general population studies, longitudinal analyses, etc). In lieu of a 1000-year experiment (which we cannot recreate), we can make predictions. If factor X was primarily genetic, we would expect to observe A, B, C. If factor X was primarily environmental, we would expect to observe D, E, F. Then, we can basically incorporate various studies and results and do gradient descent, and observing which (means squared error) is smaller.

None of this is groundbreaking stuff, I know. But I have read arguments from both the primarily environmental camp and the primarily genetics camp, and one of them has to do a lot more mental gymnastics explain the differences between obvious predictions (under this paradigm) and the observed data in the real world.
by wmorgan | 2025-08-30 16:39:49+00:00
Untrusted userspace is exactly right. I’d expect these approaches to help on the margin but the authors oversell their point using words like “guarantee.”

Control tool access like OSes enforce file permissions: I understand it’s a metaphor, but also isn’t the track record of OSes here pretty bad?

Check whether the agent is allowed to use the booking tool: so a web browser? Isn’t a browser a pretty powerful general-purpose tool, which by the way could also expose the agent to, like, a jailbreak?

> As such, security researchers have to devise new mitigations to prevent AI models taking adversarial actions even with the virtual machine constraints.

An understated reminder that yes, we really ought to solve alignment.
by jadbox | 2025-08-30 16:40:07+00:00
Mort, Elvis, Einstein, Amanda does seem to fit well with my experience. While people are a mix, generally I think its fair that there is a primary focus/mode that fits on career goals.

- Mort wants to climb the business ladder.

- Elvis wants earned social status.

- Einstein wants legacy with unique contributions.

- Amanda just wants group cohesion and minimizing future unpredictability.
by toast0 | 2025-08-30 16:41:17+00:00
Nokia lost a lot of the US market in the 00s. They insisted on shipping SIP clients on their phones, so US carriers stopped selling their phones, when most people were only aware of carrier sold, subsidy locked phones.

Out in the rest of the world, Nokia Symbian phones were the leading smartphone platform. In the US, almost nobody knew they existed.
by mhedgpeth | 2025-08-30 16:41:19+00:00
From the author: yeah the failures I outlined were ... failures for sure! I'm not in the market for a director position at your company, but if I were I'd hope to find a place wanting people to have an honest assessment of what worked and what didn't and how they grew from it. If that's disqualifying I worry that you'll get people who are lying to you.

I'm sorry it came across as an ad, I'm full-time in a bootstrapped company working to try to solve this problem without any VC funding. It was a problem for me and for many people I know so I thought I'd share it in hopes to help people.

Also the grammar part here is interesting, I purposely write without AI because I think that's important, but I'd love your help in making it better - reach out on LinkedIn if you can. Thanks :)
by medvezhenok | 2025-08-30 16:41:29+00:00
What is the color vision equivalent of a savant? Surely you don't believe that any person could (given infinite time & training from birth), match the intellectual performance of a savant on, say, multiplying 6 digit numbers in their head?

(I think a clear savant that has a untouchable ability in one small dimension of mathematics is a clearer example than, say, von Neumann - who was equally brilliant but across many domains and in a less obvious way)
by egypturnash | 2025-08-30 16:41:38+00:00
Is dropping cr's on the floor when compressing it into a link deliberate or accidental? 'Save as image' keeps them.

https://acmail.idreesinc.com/#/share?card=Beach&start=BYUwng... vs https://bsky.app/profile/urnash.com/post/3lxmz6vpcy22g
by manuel_w | 2025-08-30 16:42:03+00:00
Doesn't he just say that Romanian Jews overperform?

I don't think there's a need to read the authors words in the worst possible way.

> I understand this as ‘it makes sense for a group with skin color X and hair color Y to be better at school’

It wouldn't make sense for the author to mean it that way, because the "white skin black hair" classification likely includes more non-Jewish than Jewish Romanians.

> followed by ‘it must be Jews’

I mean, it's not that hard to believe. If you look at (Eastern) European history, A LOT of the people of scientific or cultural significance were Jews. Don't pin me on the numbers, but if you check the Wikipedia article of a random Easter European person that left a mark in science, there is an 33-50% chance that person has some sort of Jewish background.
by rivetfasten | 2025-08-30 16:42:23+00:00
It's always a matter of chasing the bottleneck. It's fair to say that network isn't the bottleneck for most applications. Heuristically, if you're willing to take on the performance impacts of a GC'd language you're probably already not the target audience.

Zero copy is the important part for applications that need to saturate the NIC. For example Netflix integrated encryption into the FreeBSD kernel so they could use sendfile for zero-copy transfers from SSD (in the case of very popular titles) to a TLS stream. Otherwise they would have had two extra copies of every block of video just to encrypt it.

Note however that their actual streaming stack is very different from the application stack. The constraint isn't strictly technical: ISP colocation space is expensive, so they need to have the most juiced machines they can possibly fit in the rack to control costs.

There's an obvious appeal to accomplishing zero-copy by pushing network functionality into user space instead of application functionality into kernel space, so the DPDK evolution is natural.
by mhedgpeth | 2025-08-30 16:42:50+00:00
From the author of the post: it looks that way at first, but it's honestly about aligning people all around you. The true self promoters don't keep their eye on the ball of universal success.

I think I didn't study the actions of the people enough, a point I was trying to make in the post. If I would have I would have made better decisions.
by rhubinak | 2025-08-30 16:42:50+00:00
> Making batteries viable for home use is a very different story to make them viable for a grid.

True. But both are stories from the same book. Meaning: If more homes install batteries and some become fully off-grid you will stabilize the whole grid without needing to install more power generation. This is exactly what happened in Pakistan (src: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/08/pakistan-energy-affo...) and I expect will happen all over the world as:

1. PV+battery prices continue falling

2. Climate change resulting in more sunny days (one of the very few upsides)

3. The need to become more self-sufficient due to energy price volatility due to shitty govt/shitty grid/shitty neighbors attacking your neighbors

Would be nice to see some subsidy from the govt (is EU listening?) like: "here's low interest loan to take your home off grid payable over 20+ years (expected lifetime of the whole PV+bat system) during which you promise you won't connect to grid".
by revx | 2025-08-30 16:42:55+00:00
The article mostly blames pornography and digital addiction, but I think those are symptoms of a larger problem, which is lack of belonging and community. If life sucks, you have few friends you can afford the time or money to see, and you work to make other people rich until you are exhausted, when do you have time and energy to maintain a relationship? If you feel like the world is on fire, it's hard to get in the mood.

It would help if we built third spaces that weren't centered around alcohol, which is also declining in popularity, especially with young adults.

Americans: why isn't anyone having sex anymore??

Also Americans: Abstinence only! You'll get pregnant! No abortions! STDs will kill you! Men deserve sex! We're not going to teach you how your body works!

Of course we end up with declining sex, in a country so obsessed with individualism and sex-adverse.

I do see hope though. The kids in my community are being taught age-appropriate, consent-based sex ed, and the availability of free, high-quality sex ed is improving.

I would be really interested to see if sex frequency is declining for everyone, or just for people who aren't putting in any emotional labor to learning and growing as a person when it comes to sexuality.

Just some off-the-cuff thoughts :)
by touisteur | 2025-08-30 16:42:55+00:00
Recently did 400gb/s on a single core / 4x100gb nics (or just the one 400g nic, too) with dpdk. Mind you it's with jumbo frames and constant packet size for hundreds of mostly synchronized streams... You won't process each packet individually, mostly put them in queues for later batch-process by other cores. Amazing for data acquisition applications using UDP streams.

I keep watching and trying io_uring and still can't make it work as fast with simple code as consistently for those use cases. AF_XDP gets me partly there but then you're writing ebpf... might as well go full-dpdk.

Maybe it's a skill issue on my part, though. Or just a well-fitting niche.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-30 16:43:41+00:00
I’m just spitballing. But, what if we had some system that went:

1) load some model and set the system into “ready” mode

2) wait for an event from a sensor

3) when the event occurs, trigger some response

4) do other stuff; book keeping, update the model, etc,

5) reset the system to “ready” mode and goto 2

Is it possible we might want some hard time bounds on steps 2 and 3, but be fine with 1, 4, and 5 taking however long? (Assuming the device can be inactive while it is getting ready). Then, we could make sure steps 2 and 3 don’t include any non-static instructions.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-30 16:43:59+00:00
If you load malicious code into your address space and execute it, then it can always do malicious things to your data. If you load malicious code into a separate process and execute it, then it can almost certainly do malicious things to your data, unless you put it into a locked-down user context and trust your OS and environment not to have any local privilege escalations (lol). The only real way to load untrusted native code is to put it in an OS-level container and communicate via IPC, or better yet, put it in a VM and communicate via a virtual network.

The measures I suggested before were all in the context of buggy users that can't resist the urge to keep references to the library's resources lying around all over the place. But untrusted code can never be made safe with anything short of a strong sandbox.
by nathan_compton | 2025-08-30 16:44:42+00:00
You gotta love a society which persistently makes the world a worse and worse place and then complains when people don't want to have sex or have kids.

I'm not one of those weirdos who can't see that materially in some superficial ways, our lives are better than ever: medicine, toys, entertainment, and a lot of other stuff, better than ever. Not only that, I can even acknowledge that capitalism is what has provided this bounty to us.

But what it also does is underline all the time that you, personally are not "adequate" unless you want to be the kind of person who hustles all the time, who is seeking an angle or an alpha, who wants to be an entrepreneur of some kind. I think this just doesn't appeal to most people the message society is sending loud and clear is that if you just want to have a nice life and you don't want to constantly figure out new ways to improve your capital, you'll get left behind. I think for many people this doesn't seem like a cool world to have a baby in.
by rapind | 2025-08-30 16:45:05+00:00
Mort is the pragmatist, Einstein is the perfectionist, and Elvis is... let's be honest, Elvis is basically cancer to a project. I guess maybe a small dose of Elvis can help motivate?

I see the ideal as a combination of Mort and Einstein that want to keep it simple enough that it can be delivered (less abstraction, distilled requirements) while ensuring the code is sufficiently correct (not necessarily "elegant" mind you) that maintenance and support won't be a total nightmare.

IMO, seek out Morts and give them long term ownership of the project so they get a little Einstein-y when they realize they need to support that "pile of if statements".

As an aside, I'm finding coding agents to be a bit too much Mort at times (YOLO), when I'd prefer they were more Einstein. I'd rather be the Mort myself to keep it on track.
by tetha | 2025-08-30 16:45:08+00:00
I currently have one concept stuck in my mind, which I would call "Complexity distribution".

For example, at work, the simplest solution across the whole organization was to adopt the most complex PostgreSQL deployment structure and backup solutions.

This sounds counter-intuitive at first. But this way, the company can invest ~3 full time employees on having an HA, PITR capable PostgreSQL clutser with properly archived backups around ~25 other development teams can rely on. This stack solves so many B2B problems of business continuity, security, backups, availability.

And on the other hand, for the dev-teams, the PostgreSQL is suddenly very simple. Inject ~8 variables into a container and you can claim all of these good things for your application without ever thinking about those.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-30 16:45:24+00:00
> Every function can fail with StackOverflowError and you can't do anything about it.

> Almost every function can fail with OutOfMemoryError and you can't do anything about it.

In fact we can - though rarely do - prove software does not have either of these mistakes. We can bound stack usage via analysis, we usually don't but it's possible.

And avoiding OOM is such a widespread concern that Rust-for-Linux deliberately makes all allocating calls explicitly fallible or offers strategies like Vec::push_within_capacity a method which, if it succeeds pushes the object into the collection, but, if it's full rather than allocate (which might fail) it gives back the object - no, you take it.
by bwfan123 | 2025-08-30 16:45:53+00:00
I would disagree with the premise of this article.

All this talk of simplicity may mislead one into building something that just about works, and calling it a day. I believe that is a mistaken approach in science and engineering. Instead, there should be a deeper understanding of the limits and constraints on the problem. In my view, the focus should be on the problem and its constraints rather than on the nature of the solution.

An analogy in terms of algorithms would be: Why take the pains to implement an O(nlogn) solution to sorting when you can implement a O(n^2) solution which is far simpler. ie, be satisfied with a feasible solution instead of seeking what could be more optimal. The road to interesting insights may not be linear and incremental. Doing the simplest thing at all times is an incremental greedy approach.
by johnisgood | 2025-08-30 16:45:55+00:00
> Since there aren't good cross-platform and race-condition-free ways of saying "authenticate this external library via checksum/codesigning, then load it", there are some situations where the proposed approaches aren't good enough.

Sign your libraries with Ed25519 and embed the public key in your app, verify before load. How is this not cross-platform enough?

Of course you still introduce a TOCTOU (time of check, time of use) race condition, which is why oftentimes you want to first check, load, then check again.

A common solution, however, is opening the library file once, then verify checksum/signature against trusted key, and if valid, create a private, unlinked temporary file (O_TMPFILE on Linux), write the verified contents into this temporary file, rewind and dlopen() (or LoadLibrary()) this temporary copy. Because the file is unlinked after creation (or opened with O_TMPFILE), no one else can swap it out, and you eliminate TOCTOU this way because you only ever read and load the exact bytes you verified. This is how container runtimes and some plugin systems avoid races. BTW on Linux you can use memfd_create() which creates an anonymous, in-memory file descriptor. You can do the same on Windows and macOS. Then you can verify the library's signature / hash, copy verified contents into a memfd (Linux) or FileMapping (Windows), and then load directly from that memory-backed handle.

TL;DR: never load from a mutable path after verification. Verifying untrusted binary bytes into a sealed memfd, for example, is race-safe.

FWIW, for applications I use firejail (not bubblewrap) for all applications such as my browser, Discord, LibreOffice, mupdf, etc. I recommend everyone to do the same. No way in hell I will give my browser access to files it does not need access to. It only has access to what it needs (related to pulseaudio, Downloads directory, etc), and say, no way I will give Discord access to my downloaded files (or my browser history) or anything really, apart from a directory where I put files I want to send.