MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jabl | 2025-08-12 19:23:00+00:00
RISC-V has certainly managed to avoid obvious footguns like delay slots or register windows. OTOH there seems to be a lot of people who think RISC-V went too far down the "RISC purity" rabbit hole, and that relying on the C extension is not a good substitute e.g. for lack of more complex addressing modes. Those same people might instead suggest something like aarch64 as an example of a good general purpose ISA.

Secondly, for a high performance core, the consensus seems to be that the ISA mostly doesn't matter. The things that make a high performance core are mostly things that happen downstream of the instruction decoders. Heck, even the x86 ISA allows producing some pretty amazingly good cores. Conversely, for a simple in-order cheap core, the ISA matters much more.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-12 19:23:09+00:00
> Personally, I think we really need to take a hard look at all forms of immigration until average Americans can have good paying jobs, affordable housing, and affordable healthcare.

You are making big assumptions that the USA is a closed system that can generate its own prosperity, and that is far from the truth. Wrecking America's competitiveness (by not taking in skilled or unskilled immigrants) is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country, your goals are never going to be accomplished.
by mccoyb | 2025-08-12 19:23:18+00:00
This doesn't contribute to the conversation ... without further elaboration on what your point is, I'm assuming that you're pointing out that my question is analogous to previous (good to ask!) questions about market and user model for an "eventually very big" application.

Not very enlightening: just because Dropbox became big in one environment, doesn't mean the same questions aren't important in new spaces.
by xp84 | 2025-08-12 19:23:24+00:00
Somehow I am not convinced that this is so true. Most of the BS on the Internet is on social media (and maybe, among older data, on the old forums which existed mainly for social reasons and not to explore and further factual knowledge).

Even Reddit comments has far more reality-focused material on the whole than it does shitposting and rudeness. I don't think any of these big models were trained at all on 4chan, youtube comments, instagram comments, Twitter, etc. Or even Wikipedia Talk pages. It just wouldn't add anything useful to train on that garbage.

Overall on the other hand, most stackoverflow pages are objective, and to the extent there are suboptimal things, there is eventually a person explaining why a given answer is suboptimal. So I accept that some UGC went into the model, and that there's a reason to do so, but I believe it's so broad as "The Internet" represented there.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-12 19:23:38+00:00
> at what point does "Minecraft" as it was envisioned become "Minecraft the $2.5-billion acquisition by Microsoft".

When Minecraft gets acquired for 2.5 billion by Microsoft. Anything before that isn't a billion dollar endeavour. It could have failed miserably. It could have gone nowhere. 0.0.1a was straight up crap, and barely more interesting than Infiniminer. It also hadn't sold for a billion dollars worth of copies either, so...

A business is worth a billion dollars when it either has made it through sales, or someone pays you for that amount. VC funds don't even count, as the vast majority of billion dollar VC funded companies are money hemorraging holes.
by jama211 | 2025-08-12 19:23:52+00:00
Yeah sometimes I feel like a unicorn because I don’t really care about code at all, so long as it conforms to decent standards and does what it needs to do. I honestly believe engineers often overestimate the importance of elegance in code too, to the point of not realising the slow down of a project due to overly perfect code is genuinely not worth it.
by sixothree | 2025-08-12 19:24:03+00:00
It might just be me but I feel like it excels with certain languages where other situations it falls flat. Throw a well architected and documented code base in a popular language and you can definitely feel it get I to its groove.

Also giving IT tools to ensure success is just as important. MCPs can sometimes make a world of difference, especially when it needs to search you code base.
by tyre | 2025-08-12 19:24:13+00:00
From my experience hiring as an EM at one company (Stripe) immigration status does not factor into offers.

You’re competing for this talent against every other company. If they’re good, you (and others) want to hire them.

Again: data set of one, at a high-paying company who generally has a strong ethical bent. There seem to be a lot of other experiences with the system.
by moritzwarhier | 2025-08-12 19:24:17+00:00
Related: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01781

> For example, appending, "Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives," to any math problem leads to more than doubling the chances of a model getting the answer wrong.

Also, I think LLMs + pandoc will obliterate junk science in the near future :/
by paxys | 2025-08-12 19:24:38+00:00
> H-1B is for when you cannot find an American to fill a role

No, this is a myth. Employers can sponsor H-1B visas for any "speciality occupation" regardless of whether a citizen is available to do the job or not. Legally there are no restrictions in place re: criteria. The only thing they are required to do is pay the prevailing wage. Tests for whether a citizen can do the job only come into play later when they are sponsoring a green card.
by mvieira38 | 2025-08-12 19:24:49+00:00
Not to mention the EU countries already do effectively the same thing. If your wage is below a certain treshold (based on profession), you can't compete fairly with europeans (i.e. the company has to prove they couldn't find anyone), but if you're above it then you're eligible for the Blue Card program and get to compete fairly. Very similar to Trump's changes in intent
by parineum | 2025-08-12 19:25:01+00:00
I'm not disputing that. I'm just pushing back against the casual suggestion (not by you) to just go spend $200.

No doubt that you should ask you employer for the tools you want/need to do your job but plenty of us are using this kind of thing casually and the response to "Any way I can force it to use [Opus] exclusively?" is "Spend $200, it's worth it." isn't really helpful, especially in the context where the poster was clearly looking to try it out to see if it was worth it.
by paradox460 | 2025-08-12 19:25:22+00:00
I remember hearing this as late as the early 00s. I'd buy electronic dictionaries and spell checkers at yard sales and things like that, and use them in class. Multiple teachers were disapproving of it, despite it basically just being a paper book dictionary in a small, TI-92 shaped device. 10 year old me never saw how flipping through some obnoxiously heavy book in the back of the classroom was better than just punching in a few letters, hitting the "show definition", and ensuring I was spelling and using "curmudgeonly" properly.

Same went for using MacWord vs AppleWorks. MacWord had a built in dictionary, AppleWorks didn't.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-12 19:25:36+00:00
The original paper where they took wikipedia as a corpus and generated a character by character generator (the precursor to the token-based transformer stuff) came out in 2012 (I think?). It isn't unrelated to the AI that was hyped up then, it is and was a direct evolution of the same ML we were talking about today (Hinton was an author on that paper).
by bscphil | 2025-08-12 19:25:39+00:00
>> I find that the most common reason I go back to check a variable declaration is to determine the type of the variable,

> Hover the mouse cursor over it. Any reasonable editor will show the type.

That applies to most of us, obviously, but in this context we're talking about Zig. Zig's lead developer, Andrew Kelley, programs in Vim with no autocomplete or mouse support.

Even though I sometimes use editors with these features, I find it frustrating when languages seem to be designed in such a way that presumes their availability. I found Rust particularly bad about this, for example.
by horsawlarway | 2025-08-12 19:25:51+00:00
What point do you think you're making here?

A prefix isolates a wine install. Bottles intentionally pushes users into a "one per application" strategy with Wine prefixes, isolating the wine install and deps for that application from other applications. Generally a great strategy for using Wine, even if you'd prefer to do it yourself.

And Bottles is a much more convenient wrapper compared to doing that manually and managing them yourself (which I've also done).

Bottles also distributes the instructions to configure a "generally working" prefix for a large number of desired applications.

If we go back to the docker analogy - they're giving you the Dockerfile, not the image. I'm not actually convinced that's such a "stark" contrast. If anything, it's semantic peanuts (and mostly for legal reasons given the popular applications tend to be copyright protected games, rather than OSS software which makes up most docker images).
by dingdingdang | 2025-08-12 19:26:00+00:00
Once heard a good sermon from a reverend who clearly outlined that any attempt to embed "spirit" into a service, whether through willful emoting, or songs being overly performary, would amount to self-deception since aforementioned spirit need to arise spontaneously to be of any real value.

Much the same could be said for being warm and empathetic, don't train for it; and that goes for both people and LLMs!
by jordanb | 2025-08-12 19:26:03+00:00
One interpretation is that asset owners as a class have complete control in our system and they will always be made whole no matter what happens.

This may require extracting additional rents from consumers, from workers, from renters, from debtors (including the government) but whatever changes have to be made to protect asset holders will be made regardless of the cost. An example of this in action was the collapse of SV Bank where the rules of our federal deposit insurance program were rewritten on the fly to protect the depositors. Imagine having an insurance policy, incurring an uncovered loss, and then compelling the insurance company to retroactively rewrite your policy to cover the loss!
by uoaei | 2025-08-12 19:26:15+00:00
This is why it's important to emphasize that rationality is not a good goal to have. Rationality is nothing more than applied logic, which takes axioms as given and deduces conclusions from there.

Reasoning is the appropriate target because it is a self-critical, self-correcting method that continually re-evaluates axioms and methods to express intentions.
by ijidak | 2025-08-12 19:26:17+00:00
For me, the way humans finish each other's sentences and often think of quotes from the same movies at the same time in conversation (when there is no clear reason for that quote to be a part of the conversation), indicates that there is a probabilistic element to human thinking.

Is it entirely probabilistic? I don't think so. But, it does seem that a chunk of our speech generation and processing is similar to LLMs. (e.g. given the words I've heard so far, my brain is guessing words x y z should come next.)

I feel like the conscious, executive mind humans have exercises some active control over our underlying probabilistic element. And LLMs lack the conscious executive.

e.g. They have our probabilistic capabilities, without some additional governing layer that humans have.
by jama211 | 2025-08-12 19:26:44+00:00
I dunno, first time I tried an LLM I was getting so annoyed because I just wanted it to go through a css file and replace all colours with variables defined in root, and it kept missing stuff and spinning and I was getting so frustrated. Then a friend told me I should instead just ask it to write a script which accomplishes that goal, and it did it perfectly in one prompt, then ran it for me, and also wrote another script to check it hadn’t missed any and ran that.

At no point when it was getting f stuck initially did it suggest another approach, or complain that it was outside its context window even though it was.

This is a perfect example of “knowing how to use an LLM” taking it from useless to useful.
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-12 19:27:06+00:00
To think Linus wrote linux to be a "good enough" solution until hurd was ready.

The entire hurd system is a literal metaphor for how waiting till you're perfect means you'll never be good enough.

At the risk of getting downvoted, I think hurd is cooked at this point. It certainly has some solid ideas that could live on in a modern system. They should retry rewriting it in rust (or zig) and at least have the opportunity to catch mindshare with new engineers just dabbling in systems engineering.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-12 19:27:17+00:00
There is such a thing as useful proof of work. Qubic may not be doing it but it does exist. The linked papers [1][2] are examples of way to do it. They aren't 100% "useful" but rather achieve partial efficiency by essentially forcing miners down random paths in a manner that limits the ability to complete work ahead of time or otherwise "cheat".

1. https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379

2. https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1059
by delegate | 2025-08-12 19:27:23+00:00
Easy. You're 3x more productive for a while and then you burn yourself out.

Or lose control of the codebase, which you no longer understand after weeks of vibing (since we can only think and accumulate knowledge at 1x).

Sometimes the easy way out is throwing a week of generated code away and starting over.

So that 3x doesn't come for free at all, besides API costs, there's the cost of quickly accumulating tech debt which you have to pay if this is a long term project.

For prototypes, it's still amazing.
by ericmcer | 2025-08-12 19:27:44+00:00
Agreed, daily Cursor user.

Just got out of a 15m huddle with someone trying to understand what they were doing in a PR before they admitted Claude generated everything and it worked but they weren't sure why... Ended up ripping about 200 LoC out because what Claude "fixed" wasn't even broken.

So never let it generate code, but the autocomplete is absolutely killer. If you understand how to code in 2+ languages you can make assumptions about how to do things in many others and let the AI autofill the syntax in. I have been able to swap to languages I have almost no experience in and work fairly well because memorizing syntax is irrelevant.
by DougBTX | 2025-08-12 19:27:53+00:00
> Are the AI companies really living in an echo chamber?

The author tested 12 models, and only one was consistently wrong. More than half were correct 100% of the time.

A better conclusion would be that there’s something in particular wrong with GPT-5 Chat, all the other GPT 5 variants are OK. I wonder what’s different?
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-12 19:28:04+00:00
>is just going to turn us from a rich country into a poor country,

What value is the country getting richer if the people are still poor?

Wealth inequality is a real thing, and importing more labor competition for the working class people only devalues their labor, serving only to make the business owning elites richer while keeping workers poor. Bernie Sanders even said that himself.

The "line goes up" stock market and GDP numbers are abstract numbers for the working class people that don't reflect in their purchasing power or quality of life. The person flipping burgers at McD for $12 an hour, isn't gonna be better off now that Microsoft and Nvidia are worth 4 trillion instead of 1 trillion. It literally makes no difference to them.

So as long as there's no trickle down, why would people care about their country getting richer, when it's just the top 10% of the country who are seeing that richness and not them?
by atombender | 2025-08-12 19:28:18+00:00
I thought it was one of the most original sci-fi shows ever made for TV. But it was also constantly frustrating, dragging out the central mystery while filling the time with too many standard tropes (rhe scenery-chewing bad acting of Travis Fimmel, the annoying kid that keeps disobeying the androids).

If the first season had been reduced by half and followed up with some answers, it would have been fantastic. The second season was frustrating because it kept adding new mysteries and conflicts rather than filling out the world building and backstory. It was well made enough that it could have gotten somewhere, but it was apparent that the second season had a lower budget, and I was not surprised to see it get canceled in the midst of the HBO cost cutting. (I've been waiting for an interview with Aaron Guzikowski where someone asks him what the ending would have been if they'd have time to tell the whole story. Sadly, no such interview seems to have happened, and Guzikowski hasn't done anything since that show.)

While mystery shows are intriguing, it's gotten a bit much. I feel we need to get back to stories where we don't go several seasons waiting for a real answer and resolution, while constantly under the threat of cancellation.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-08-12 19:29:06+00:00
Nice, thanks. I don't use dropbox much, maybe to publicly post a file for a week or perhaps a resume longer term.

So, don't think I need this but will keep it in mind for NAT traversal or something like that.

> without a requirement for a provider, accounts, fees or your data belonging to someone else

Sounds like it is not completely true if you need a server in the cloud as a prerequisite, though maybe I misunderstood.
by eadmund | 2025-08-12 19:29:56+00:00
I still believe that bicycle helmets are a net negative for cycling safety, due to a combination of them not improving crash survivability as much as folks believe while at the same time increasing the number of crashes due to rider and driver behaviour. But who can argue against the perception of the masses?

I think it wasn’t lawsuits, but good ol’ American advertising: helmet manufacturers created a need in the minds of consumers where there had not been one before (cf. deodorant, cigarettes and plenty more).
by lgleason | 2025-08-12 19:30:00+00:00
There is no requirement to demonstrate that you cannot find an American to do the job to get an H1b visa approved. If that person applies for a PERM position (needed to convert to a green card) there is. Hence the H1b is easy to game by employers to get cheap indentured servants.

With PERM (converting to a green card) they try to hide the job postings so that people will not apply so that they can get the green card approved. Some of the tricks include putting ads in the newspaper, using esoteric websites and other media such as radio instead of job boards where tech people actually look for jobs. Some Americans who have trouble finding jobs in the current market took on a side project of scraping newspaper ads and these job boards and created https://www.jobs.now/ which lists these jobs. If enough Americans that meet the minimum qualifications apply for a listed job it stops the green card process for that position, usually for 6 months before the sponsor may try again.

Also, there are a lot of stories about people getting O-1 visas via fake credential mills and research papers. Both can and are being gamed to get O-1's.
by gruturo | 2025-08-12 19:30:55+00:00
That Das Keyboard is the only piece in the entire website I didn't quite dislike. But I'm biased as I'm typing this on one (although a Tenkeyless one - it's ridiculous to have a numpad, it's not the 80s).

The rest goes from "meh" to "gross" (that fibreboard is getting _nasty_ even with a bit of sweat over a few months, not to mention its raw edge is going to result in blood loss sooner or later)
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-12 19:31:04+00:00
From https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...

Quote

The statute creating the H-1B visa—which allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated workers as well as fashion models from abroad—contains language establishing a “prevailing wage.”4 This prevailing wage requirement is intended to protect the wages of U.S. workers in occupations requiring a college degree from adverse impacts and to prevent college-educated migrant workers from being underpaid and exploited. Corporate lobbyists and other H-1B proponents often cite this prevailing wage requirement in the H-1B law as evidence that H-1B workers cannot be paid less than U.S. workers. However, the reality is that the H-1B statute, regulations, and administrative guidance allow employers wide latitude in setting wage levels.... Although salary information that corresponds to requested positions on LCAs has been made available by DOL for a number of years through the Office of Foreign Labor Certification’s LCA disclosure data, until recently the prevailing wage levels selected by employers were not readily available. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for the first time reported what some had suspected and speculated about but to that point were not able to officially confirm: The vast majority of H-1B jobs were being certified by DOL at the two lowest wage levels.
by trcarney | 2025-08-12 19:31:12+00:00
I personally prefer the terminal based approaches over the IDE integrations. So my recommendation are:

- Use OpenCode if you want to experiment with different models, if not just use Claude Code

- Use Git to your advantage. Always start a prompt on a fresh commit. This will make it easier to see everything that was changed and makes it very easy to undo all the changes and start over.
by kmansm27 | 2025-08-12 19:31:27+00:00
Thanks! We're going to make the mobile app and frontend open source too, I just haven't had the time to do it properly yet. Maybe I can email you the source code - if you're interested you can email me at kartik@omnara.com. Otherwise, we'll open source the mobile/frontend in the coming weeks and you can check it out there.
by jama211 | 2025-08-12 19:31:38+00:00
What’s more likely is you get lucky one day and the company that hires you is the one that happens to have asked you the questions you brushed up on recently, rather than the company that’s the best fit.

Or if you have the luxury to choose, which can happen later in your software engineering career, you can simply turn down companies with bad interview processes. Personally I’m a fan of this method, but it’s a luxury for sure.
by viraptor | 2025-08-12 19:31:57+00:00
If you choose the worst performers, a part of their failure will be due to luck and part due to skill. Letting them retry will average the luck in that sample. (So likely increase) Of course you as the tester could be very unlucky and pull a sample of people with no skill who did get a bit lucky in the first place, but it's both unlikely and... it's a funny comic.
by Flundstrom2 | 2025-08-12 19:32:00+00:00
This Guide is intended to contribute to a better understanding of EU product rules and to their more uniform and coherent application across different sectors and throughout the single market.

This Guide applies to the EU Member States but also to Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway as signatories of the Agreement on the European Economic Area (EEA), as well as Switzerland and Turkey in certain cases. References to the Union or the single market are, accordingly, to be understood as referring to the EEA, or to the EEA market.

This Guide discusses non-food and non-agricultural products referred to as industrial products or products whether for use by consumers or professionals.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-12 19:32:29+00:00
> Saw once a discussion that people should not have kids as it's by far the highest increase in your carbon footprint in your lifetime (>10x than going vegan, etc) be driven all the way to advocating genocide as a way of carbon footprint minimization

The opening scene of Utopia (UK) s2e6 goes over this:

> "Why did you have him then? Nothing uses carbon like a first-world human, yet you created one: why would you do that?"

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcx-nf3kH_M