MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tbrownaw | 2025-08-29 23:25:48+00:00
Consider for example, computerizing a currently-manual process. And the 80/20 rule.

Do you handle one "everything is perfect" happy path, and use a manual exception process for odd things?

Do you handle "most" cases, which is more tech work but shrinks the number of people you need handling one-off things?

Or do you try to computerize everything no matter how rare?
by markus_zhang | 2025-08-29 23:25:58+00:00
I get it man. It’s really tough. How old is your kid? Mine is a 5 years old boy and he doesn’t seem to need a lot of sleep but a huge amount of companionship which really bugs me out.

In theory, it’s better to sleep early, get up around 5 and get 2 hours of quality time, but man he sometimes gets up around 6:15 and earlier, and I found it difficult to get good sleep anyway, so I tried to switch to 2 hours of night time, but he wants to sleep with me for 30 mins around 9pm before going to my wife’s bed, and I usually fell sleep sooner than he did…

Girls are much easier to raise. They sleep earlier and don’t fight too much, as far as I heard from friends.
by dwheeler | 2025-08-29 23:26:05+00:00
I don't like the phrase "real coder". It's not clear what it means.

I really like the word "assistant" for what we have today. The AI code assistant tools available today, like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, can't replace humans in doing software development. Not even close. But they are often useful to human developers, and today, that's the more important measure.

I've been spending time with various AI tools, especially Claude Code and GitHub Copilot. They're amazing one minute, and they make bone-headedly bad recommendations the next. It takes effort to learn how to create good prompts, and if you want the results to be good, you have to review and critique the results. I'm particularly concerned about security. They're definitely happy to write insecure code. If you know what you're doing, prompt them well, and review their results, you can get good results.

I don't know if they'll ever reach "full autonomy". They don't need to get there to be useful.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-08-29 23:26:31+00:00
> If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed.

The emphasized part of this quote is probably far more important than you give credit for.

I imagine a lot of solo game devs simply don't have the money to pay for marketing, and with many communities having rules against self-promotion, combined with the latest Discord phishing scam being "Hey can you try my game?" and delivering a trojan, it can be hard to get your game in front of people. Even if you're in a community for game devs, most of members are there to get people to play their game, not someone looking for a game to try.

I bet there are some real diamonds out there, hidden in obscurity, lost in the landfill of early attempts at making a game.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-29 23:27:51+00:00
That sounds like FUD.

The location of the Colossus datacenter is well known. It happens to be located in an industrial area, nestled between an active steel manufacturing plant (apparently scrap metal with an electric blast furnace, which should mean enormous power draw but no coke coal at least?), and an active industrial scale natural gas power plant.

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0605698,-90.1562034,933m

With that, I just don't buy that it's the datacenter that is somehow the most notable consumer of fossil fuel power (or, for that matter, water) in the area.
by bgirard | 2025-08-29 23:29:05+00:00
I proposed will-change a decade ago when I used to work on the rendering stack at Mozilla and also tuned frontends.

In some circumstances the heads up is totally required. For example if you're on a low spec mobile device with a relatively high resolution display, you're in a situation where you can't build a layer for an animation you didn't expect. And your memory footprint is so low so you don't want to be building layers unless you need them. If you don't have the heads up then you're going to drop the first few frames of the animation and the experience is going to be janky every time.

If you're in a situation where it's not required, then I would advice against using it FWIW. I still work on optimizing web frontends and I almost never use this property because I rarely need it.
by jakogut | 2025-08-29 23:29:43+00:00
I think the problem is that there's not a single identifiable problem. There's a series of related problems caused by manufacturing and engineering decisions that lead to parts not interoperating as designed.

For example, Sig offered a "voluntary upgrade" to fix the well documented drop safety flaw with the P320, and there's video proof of the same guns going off still in holsters.

Sig is going to be playing whackamole fixing these issues if they ever admit to it, so they won't.
by leoc | 2025-08-29 23:30:09+00:00
Masters of Doom does seems to want to, however accurately or not, set Carmack up as the antagonist of its story against Romero as the hero sometimes. I think that readers just largely didn't notice that since Carmack's heroic image was already so firmly established. In fact some of the early-ID stuff really does seem to raise some questions. (Was Tim Willits mostly Carmack's protégé, for instance?)
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-29 23:31:01+00:00
>Is he now more concerned with protecting shareholder value? Who cares.

It doesn't sound like he's concerned with waste. It sounds like it's a typical Carmack argument - distilled and hyper logical, and his conclusion is more to do with the pointlessness of it. He actually concedes the point that the project may have been highly efficient (which it may or may not have been, he was steelmanning).

His main points seemed to be:

If every cycle matters and efficiency is paramount, just make the project monolithic C++ code. If every cycle matters, that is somewhat incompatible with general purpose OSs, and if it doesn't, the existing landscape is more than good enough. Presumably, he's calling out the absurdity of counter-arguments which are being unrealistic about the objectives of creating a new general purpose OS, while also focusing on extreme efficiency. He states that the requirements to fully achieve these objectives would require a "monastic coding enclave" like Plan 9 OS, and it wasn't realistic even with the high talent in Meta.

And that plays into the second point, which seems to essentially be "new OSs aren't a draw for developers, they are a burden". This is painfully obvious when looking at the history of OSs and software, and it's the obvious reason why "let the kids build their operating system ffs" should result in a reflexive "noooo..." from the greybeards. The deeper point though is that if A. is achieved, the B. Burden on devs will be even more onerous. Therefore unless the entire project is committed to truly moving crowds to new paradigms (good luck, literally billions have been lost here), just use the proven, faily high performance options that have widespread support.

The conclusion is "on balance, it's a bad idea." He's arguing it sharply (although I understand a Carmack steelman is intimidating to attack), but in essence it's a fairly banal and conservative conclusion, backed with strong precedent.
by thepryz | 2025-08-29 23:31:18+00:00
Expecting that you can change people, in my experience, is quixotic. What you can change is yourself and how you interpret and respond to events around you.

If I understand the hypothetical you've proposed, my advice would be for you to adapt and learn to be less sensitive rather than have you believe that you can manipulate the environment, or worse, directly manipulate people.

It's possible that you could be a positive influence for change, so I don't want to completed discount any effort there, but I also think it's worth being realistic about what you can actually affect.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-29 23:32:10+00:00
The memory is allocated by the runtime that has the io_uring backend. You ask it for memory which it manages in its own memory allocator. Lifetime is managed no differently than Vec. For example, when you drop the DmaBuffer [1] it goes back into the pool. Or you hand it off as an I/O submission after filling it up.

The memory frequently needs to be mlocked memory anyway, so a general purpose allocator doesn't work.

[1] https://docs.rs/glommio/latest/glommio/fn.allocate_dma_buffe...
by gamblor956 | 2025-08-29 23:32:55+00:00
You can’t even sell something to someone in a different state without having to remit various taxes, even if you didn’t step foot in that state.

This is not true. Sales taxes have a threshold requirement before out-of-state retailers are required to collect and remit sales taxes for customers in a state. It's usually 200 transactions or $100,000. If you're doing that much business with a state, you can and should be able to handle sales tax. And if you don't want to deal with it yourself, you can use a third party service like Avalara or TaxJar to handle the sales tax compliance for you (rate calculation, remittance, and returns).

especially with how easy it is to freeze electronic money accounts.

That is actually very difficult to do in the U.S. Generally, freezing accounts is limited to certain criminal matters or regulatory violations. It doesn't happen in civil litigation. At most the judge can order withholding or garnishment if the penalized party evades payment of the judgment.

I am also not sure how a dealership would have preventer Tesla from deleting crash data, and falsely claiming it did.

In most states, you can just go to a local dealer (or service center) to recover data from a vehicle if you can't do it using a third party. It's generally quite rare to go to the automaker to pull data from a vehicle. That's a Tesla specific thing, except in rare situations where a vehicle may be so damaged that special expertise is required.
by baby_souffle | 2025-08-29 23:33:12+00:00
That might be how they implement it technically, but I think the rules allow for some wiggle room.

If I move to a new state, I typically have a grace period to change the state of registration on my vehicle. I'm not immediately penalized for having out of state plates the very next day but if I get pulled over 3 months after I've moved, I might have a tougher time.
by marssaxman | 2025-08-29 23:35:08+00:00
In terms of copyright law, it matters very much whether Joe Schmoe is using his own copy of the data for his own purposes, or whether he is making more copies and distributing them to other people.

If the AI companies were letting people download copies of their training data, copyright law would certainly have something to say about that. But no: once they download the training data, they keep it, and they don't share it.
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-29 23:35:14+00:00
I'm always on the lookout for the highest quality game that was a failure. I'm open to hearing some here.

To potential game developers: Do not despair based on reports of a difficult market, despair based upon games you have personally looked at that failed.

Personally, for almost every failed game I can see a good reason why it failed. Sometimes games succeed and I don't understand why, but so far I haven't seen a game that failed and I don't understand why.

If what I'm saying is true, then to succeed you simply need to build a game that does none of the things that lead to failure.
by agwa | 2025-08-29 23:35:47+00:00
No, the metadata is information like the modification time and permissions, not the directory entry.

The next paragraph in the man page explains this:

> Calling fsync() does not necessarily ensure that the entry in the directory containing the file has also reached disk. For that an explicit fsync() on a file descriptor for the directory is also needed.

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/fsync.2.html

Edit to add: I don't think there's a single Unix-like OS on which fsync would also fsync the directory, since a file can appear in an arbitrary number of directories, and the kernel doesn't know all the directories in which an open file appears.

This is a moot point anyways, because in DELETE mode, the operation that needs to be durably persisted is the unlinking of the journal file - what would you fsync for that besides the directory itself?
by bdangubic | 2025-08-29 23:36:08+00:00
every complex domain and “at scale” is just a bunch of simple things in disguise… our industry is just terrible in general about breaking things down. we sort of know this so we came up with shit things like “microservices” but you spend sufficient time in the industry (almost three decades for me) and you won’t find a single place that has microservices architecture than you haven’t wished was a monolith :) we are just terrible at this… there is no complex domain, it is just a good excuse we use to justify things
by BeetleB | 2025-08-29 23:36:37+00:00
We don't need reals to make the math rigorous. Only to make the math a lot more tractable.

I've solved multiple continuous value problems by discretizing, applying combinatorics to the techniques, and then taking the limit of the result - you of course get the same result if you had simply used regular integration/differentiation, and it's a lot easier to use calculus than combinatorics.

But the point is the "rational", discretized approach will get you arbitrarily close to the answer.

It's why many analysis textbooks define a (given) real number as "a sequence of converging rational numbers" (before even defining what a limit is).
by BeetleB | 2025-08-29 23:40:27+00:00
> Especially since there are well-established math proofs of irrational numbers.

The logic is circular, simply because mathematicians are the ones who invented irrationals. Of course they have proofs on them. They also have proofs on lots of things that don't exist in this universe.

And as I pointed out elsewhere, many analysis textbooks define a real number to be "a (converging) sequence of rationals". The notion of convergence is defined before reals even enter into the picture, and a real number is merely the identifier for a given converging sequence of rationals.
by dcreater | 2025-08-29 23:40:55+00:00
thanks for clarifying. I guess my comment was more directed to the fact that pydantic, the company is 1) VC backed 2) Unclear how/when/what you will monetize 3) how that will affect the open source stuff.

I strongly believe you guys should be compensated very well for what you bring to the ecosystem but the probability of open source projects being enshittified by private interests is non-trivially high.
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-29 23:41:16+00:00
Yes and sorry for the delay. A common issue/complaint I see with fellow programmers is they feel like they haven't actually made something on their own. Perhaps they've only followed tutorials, implemented random features in their day job, or perhaps they actually have written something kind of cool but it is sitting unused by anyone in a github or hard drive somewhere.

This often translates to anxiety once you get into an interview, because you are trying to answer behavioral/design/career questions based on some heuristic, some proxy, some guess at "what the interviewer wants to hear".

While some interviewers are indeed assholes who play weird games and don't operate anywhere near reality, the truth is, if you've written literally anything that people actually use even weekly to do something (e.g a blender add on that simplifies texture baking, a toy online chat room as a discord alternative, a wrapper for ffmpeg or etc to convert files to different formats, a simple time wasting game in threejs, etc), you will be astonishingly more confident in your answers, even if they don't work every time.

Why is that? Because, by actually writing software without a tutorial that is still good enough for someone to use, it guarantees you have solved some problem, without any help besides reference documentation, and have therefore wrestled with crucial design questions like "should i make this a vector or a scalar? do i need a map here? should i do this by naming convention? should this be done in a loop or should i make it a task for multiple threads?"

It doesn't mean you should like, focus on marketing or chasing hot problems, but definitely do this if you are feeling like you are faking some parts of your interview questions, which are so abstract, they can benefit from delivering a real world answer naturally and confidently.
by HimTortons | 2025-08-29 23:41:38+00:00
Thanks for commenting! These are really helpful. Super helpful framing.

Here's where my thinking is going (I could be totally wrong, but this is new ground for me);

You nailed the problem on commitments. A lot of AIs will say “I’ll do X” and then immediately let the thread drift. PMM logs those as commit_open events, and tracked promises.They don’t close unless there’s actual evidence (file, PR link, or at minimum a Done: markers that gets picked up by the BehaviorEngine).

That’s why my close rates look brutally low right now. I’d rather see a truthful 0.000% than a fake 100% “done.”

Over time, the evidence hooks should help close more loops, but always with proof. Or at least that's what I'm trying to nail down. lol

I went with “reflection” because it emphasizes the recursive/self-referential aspect, but “insight” or “observation” might be clearer. Functionally, it’s closer to what you described, building memory from a broader context, rather than snap-shotting a single moment.

The personality scores are a just a raw blunt tool at moment. Right now I’m using IAS/GAS metrics as scaffolding, but I don’t think numbers are the endgame. I am leaning toward descriptors, or tiers within the traits, as stable representations of states within these traits. The question is, how far down do I nest?

The emergence metrics are supposed to be descriptive. I’m trying to measure what’s happening, not tell the model what it should become. In early runs, they’re mostly flat, but the hope is that with continuity and reflection, I'll see them drift in ways that track identity change over time.

If I were to be completely honest, this is a thought experiment being fleshed out. How can I create a personal AI that's model agnostic, portable, and develops in alignment in a manner that is personalized to the person using it?

So far, things seems to be tracking in the right direction from what I can see. Either that, or I'm constructing the world most amazing AI confabulation LARP machine. :)

Either way, I'm pulling my hair out in the process.
by Bjartr | 2025-08-29 23:42:05+00:00
These are all likely enough to contribute, but there's one big one.

If you don't say anything at all, the applicant has nothing to go on for a lawsuit against you.

If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement.

If you're hiring a dozen people a year, you can probably ignore this. If you're hiring hundreds or thousands, and thus many times that number of applicants, you're going to step on that landmine eventually. Better then to have a company-wide policy "no feedback ever"
by aborsy | 2025-08-29 23:42:34+00:00
I back up to Synology, but always recover from ZFS.

Synology DSM has all kinds of limitations and is slow. Your encryption cannot be like this, you cannot store data in your NVMes, the number of versions must be limited to that, you cannot search snapshots, Hyperbackup explorer provides just one button: Recover (compare that with restic or Borg!), encryption in HB is opaque, ABB is limited to specific kernel versions, information out of SMART is limited, cannot upgrade drives’ firmware, search options are too limited and search is bad, OpenVPN is old and has compatibility issues with newer systems, … I can go on and on!

You cannot compare that with a backup system with ZFS, restic/borg, syncthing and rclone, in the same class!
by xp84 | 2025-08-29 23:42:54+00:00
This requiring it to be open to everybody is an odd wish, to me. It would seem to discourage something that I don't think is a harm to anyone else: Getting your brand as a TLD (.google being a great example). Google has a trademark on "Google," so no one else can make non-mischeivous use of .google anyway. If they had to let random internet critics and trolls register theworst.google and ihate.google they just wouldn't make one, but that wouldn't make anyone else any better off, especially in the real world we live in where most people still do a double take at TLDs that aren't com, org, edu, or gov (or their nearest country code).

Maybe if we'd always had .yahoo and .aol from the beginning these brand TLDs would be a big signifier of legitimacy and thus we'd be worried about how only big corporations can afford them, but not being able to afford one in our current universe is no handicap in my humble opinion.
by gouggoug | 2025-08-29 23:43:00+00:00
TL;DR: I am nitpicking on the use of "objectively untrue" and the implication this disclaimer serves no purpose.

> The creators knew that when they wrote that disclaimer and we all know that reading the disclaimer.

This is the idea I'm pushing back against.

Yes, you are very likely correct in your assessment that the creators know that their software will be used illegally.

No, you are incorrect, in saying this is 1- "objectively untrue" and 2- implying the statement might _not_ have some protective qualities.

To take a purposefully exaggerated analogy: you can believe all day long someone committed murder, it still doesn't make it true. You can argue all day long the authors aren't being truthful, it still doesn't make it true.

> Yet the disclaimer is still placed there like it has some reason for existing beyond allowing everyone to pretend something that is happening isn’t happening

I'd agree with this, and, add that, at the same time, (assuming the USA here) it's probably placed there for legal reasons (whether it factually matters legally or not is a question for an actual lawyer, which, objectively, I am not).

> I’m just remarking on the silliness of the disclaimer.

It feels a bit silly, yes, and at the same time... needed?
by karmakaze | 2025-08-29 23:43:22+00:00
I had wanted to use Gitbook for blog/wiki[0] but then discovered that it's not opensource anymore. After not finding anything for a long while finally found something close that will work for me: Docsify[1].

Docsify is git-backed but not a static site generator. Instead it reads the markdown as-is and renders to HTML/DOM (don't know the details) in the browser. I had 2 problems with it, first the sidebar wasn't convenient to edit/update, which I handled by creating a tags: `name` `name` annotation convention. The second was it didn't work for private github repos, which was solved by using Cloudflare Pages to auto-publish changes from git. Effectively now it has a 'build' step like a static-site-generator but it's only to write _sidebar.md from the tagged *.md files.

You can see the start of my personal wiki/notes[2] which includes some info about Docsify and Cloudflare Pages & Access (transparently login-protect http paths). Note the 'Edit' buttons (which open Github in edit mode) won't work (as you don't have access to private repo).

[0] https://blog.keithkim.org

[1] https://docsify.js.org

[2] https://notes.keithkim.org
by skybrian | 2025-08-29 23:43:44+00:00
The claim is that every bb(n) is computable but I don’t think you can compute bb(6) without knowing which machines won’t halt. That doesn’t seem like a finite calculation?

But given the answer, I suppose you could write a program that just returns it. This seems to hinge on the definition of “computable.” It’s an integer, so that fits the definition of a computable number.

My mistake.
by jychang | 2025-08-29 23:44:02+00:00
Do you also disagree with the use of the name “tree” in a computer science class?

Again, nobody thinks trees in computer science contains squirrels, nobody thinks airplanes are birds, and nobody thinks a neuron in a ML model contains axons and dendrites. This is a weird hill to die on.

Are you gonna complain that the word “photograph” is “light writing” but in reality nobody is writing anything so therefore the word is wrong?