MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-22 15:40:23+00:00
Fair enough, there's a wide variance there. I'd still hesitate to say it's out of reach for most people as they'll likely have someone they know who would be able to follow those instructions for them. For the purpose of being able to access something they used to be able to access, I think most people will be able to figure this out. The point is that it's one-and-done in most instances. (To that end there's a reasonable worry that OS updates reset these settings but that's kind of a separate problem.)
by alpha_trion | 2025-08-22 15:40:51+00:00
Matthias's suggestion about reframing the context of the purpose of the Rust language struck a chord with me. His post is building a bit off of Niko Matsakis's blog post about the same concept but goes a bit more in depth. There is a perception of Rust as being just a "systems programming" language when really it is a language for building "foundational software".
by zackmorris | 2025-08-22 15:41:16+00:00
Um, no.

Doesn't anyone see that this can't be policed or everyone becomes a criminal? That AI will bring the end of copyrights and patents as we know them when literally everything becomes a derivative work? When children produce better solutions than industry veterans so we punish them rather than questioning the divine right of corporations to rule over us? What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?

I wonder if a lot of you are as humbled as I am by the arrival of AI. Whenever I use it, I'm in awe of what it comes up with when provided almost no context, coming in cold to something that I've been mulling over for hours. And it's only getting better. In 3-5 years, it will leave all of us behind. I'm saying that as someone who's done this for decades and has been down rabbit holes that most people have no frame of reference for.

My prediction is that like with everything, we'll bungle this. Those of you with big egos and large hoards of wealth that you thought you earned because you are clever will do everything you can to micromanage and sabotage what could have been the first viable path to liberation from labor in human history. Just like with the chilling effects of the Grand Upright Music ruling and the DMCA and HBO suing BitTorrent users (edit: I meant the MPAA and RIAA, HBO "only" got people's internet shut off), we have to remain eternally vigilant or the powers that be will take away all the fun:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent#C...

So no, I won't even entertain the notion of demanding proof of origin for ideas. I'm not going down this slippery slope of suing every open source project that gives away its code for free, just because a PR put pieces together in a new way but someone thought of the same idea in private and thinks they're special.
by rchaud | 2025-08-22 15:41:20+00:00
There is no way 55 million visas can be reviewed in any reasonable amount of time (cue the "AI can do it" comments). The number of H1B visa holders is a tiny fraction of 55m, if they cared about reviewing those, it'd require a lot less in time and resources.

Targeting H1b would also result in much stronger legal opposition. It takes a year to process less than 100k H1B applications annually, and companies have to pay thousands processing fees for each one. The goal of this is to discourage foreign students, refugee claimants and tourist visa holders from coming to America.
by jacobgkau | 2025-08-22 15:41:22+00:00
It's mostly already available, just not the default: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/08/make-thunderbird-yours-...

I followed the steps in that blog post and was able to mostly get there. I have a bit less padding between folders than the mock-up showed (which seems like a theme thing rather than a configuration item), and I don't have profile pictures in the message list.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-22 15:41:56+00:00
Dense infra is easier and cheaper to build and maintain than inherently sprawling single family infra where you lay down a lot of material and fixed costs just to service each single home and the infra between them.

The tax base you have per meter of sprawling single family infra doesn't even necessarily cover the maintenance. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...

And "build moar housing" trivially entails "and the infra to go with it". You're making the opposite mistake by assuming that the solution we already have is somehow better and more affordable only by the virtue that we currently have it which would only make sense if there was no maintenance needed.
by staticman2 | 2025-08-22 15:42:15+00:00
I think we are talking past each other but this has been entertaining.

I'd say anybody who writes "the LLM just produces characters with some stochastic process, therefore it's not intelligent or correct" is making an implicit argument about the way the LLM works and the way the human brain works. There might even be an implicit argument about how intelligence works.

They are not making the argument that you can't make up statistical models to describe a box, a human generated text, or an expert human opinion. But that seems to be the claim you are responding to.
by masfuerte | 2025-08-22 15:42:19+00:00
I have a non-smart budget TV. It doesn't have many features but it does let you record over the air digital TV to a USB stick. Unfortunately, the playback is incredibly janky.

I tried playing the recorded content on my laptop but I was really surprised to find that it had been encrypted. I don't get the business case for them implementing this. It's broadcast unencrypted and I can easily record it on my laptop using a dvb-t dongle.

Maybe it's a condition of using the FreeView brand in the UK? I don't know.

Anyway, it is very sad.
by clickety_clack | 2025-08-22 15:42:35+00:00
I learned about experiment design in statistics, so I wouldn’t blame statisticians for this.

There’s a lot of folks out there though who learned the mechanics of linear regression in a bootcamp or something without gaining an appreciation for the underlying theories, and those folks are looking for low p-value and as long as they get it it’s good enough.

I saw this link yesterday and could barely believe it, but I guess these folks really live among us.

https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/185507/what-happen...
by tgv | 2025-08-22 15:42:37+00:00
Typescript has another way of dealing with null/undefined: it's in the type definition, and you can't use a value that's potentially null/undefined. Using Optional<T> in Typescript is, IMO, weird. Typescript also has exceptions...

I think they only work if the language is built around it. In Rust, it works, because you just can't deref an Optional type without matching it, and the matching mechanism is much more general than that. But in other languages, it just becomes a wart.

As I said, some kind of type annotation would be most go-like, e.g.

func f(ptr PtrToData?) int { ... }

You would only be allowed to touch *ptr inside a if ptr != nil { ... }. There's a linter from uber (nilaway) that works like that, except for the type annotation. That proposal would break existing code, so perhaps something an explicit marker for non-nil pointers is needed instead (but that's not very ergonomic, alas).
by ldikrtjliaj | 2025-08-22 15:43:35+00:00
Well fucking yeah

Yesterday I asked ChatGPT a really simple, factual question. "Where is this feature on this software?" And it made up a menu that didn't exist. I told "No,, you're hallucinating, search the internet for the correct answer" and it directly responded (without the time delay and introspection bubbles that indicate an internet search) "That is not a hallucination, that is factually correct". God damn.
by bccdee | 2025-08-22 15:43:51+00:00
Yeah default values are one of Go's original sins, and it's far too late to roll those back. I don't think there are even many benefits—`int i;` is not meaningfully better than `int i = 0;`. If it's struct initialization they were worried about, well, just write a constructor.

Go has chosen explicit over implicit everywhere except initialization—the one place where I really needed "explicit."
by RadiozRadioz | 2025-08-22 15:44:11+00:00
This confused me too. It is tricky because sometimes it's more performant to copy the data rather than use a pointer, and there's not a clear boundary as to when that is the case. The advice I was given was "profile your code and make your decision data-driven". That didn't make me happy.

Now I always use pointers consistently for the readability.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-08-22 15:44:26+00:00
This is how things would (and ought to) work without a social media algorithm pushing engagement. It's a better way.

It's a shame you have to push through people making some sexual fetish the centerpiece of their online identity. That speaks volumes for the lack of maturity for the people behaving this way.

Granted the scientists heading over to BlueSky are predominantly doing so for ideological reasons, not for "effectiveness." Sean Carroll, for example, both an excellent scientist and perhaps the best science communicator out there, has declared for BlueSky, but it's largely because of his political views. Sean is a committed Democrat and his ideological in-group has declared for BlueSky.

Not content to waste an opportunity, that in-group is spinning this sort of thing as "Science (TM)" is moving to BlueSky. But it's really just moving to a comfortable echo chamber.
by glenstein | 2025-08-22 15:44:42+00:00
>The patent office doesn't serve the patenting of physical theories

That wasn't the claim and is beside the point. The reference to the patent office illustrated what notion of "perpetual motion" we were using when Drebels invention was offered as an example of one. No amount of equivocation between the formal understanding and evolving historical understanding makes Drebels device into that in ths context and I don't understand the point is of trying to equivocate about it.

Edit: As a matter of fact the patent office did grant patents for devices just like this, such as the Atmos clock which relied on passive environmental energy draw and weren't confused about it being a perpetual motion machine. So again, Drebel's device didn't belong to that category which was the category we were talking about in this context.
by remyp | 2025-08-22 15:44:42+00:00
Lately I've talked to so many people who are in a similar situation. Whether laid off or feeling stuck in the 9-5 grind, seasoned operators seem disillusioned with traditional employment in our industry.

I've heard this so often that I'm starting an incubator to bring these folks together to buy, operate, and grow existing profitable software businesses. No need to fumble around validating ideas or finding the first few customers, just focus on building and growing.

It's very early days, but I've put together a few thoughts[0] and am collecting feedback on the concept. Please feel free to reach out, my contact info is in my profile.

[0] https://www.notion.so/notventurescale/Wild-Built-Incubator-2...
by tialaramex | 2025-08-22 15:45:18+00:00
"We've made this mistake before so for consistency we need to repeat it" is such a bad idea. Ideally you want a way to go back and fix things you got wrong, but, even if you can't do that (which is itself a defect and you should figure out how you can improve) you should improve as you move forward.

C++ has struggled with this, so that paper authors sometimes plead with the committee not to make their proposal needlessly worse in the name of "consistency" with existing bad features. This famously failed for std::span, which thus managed to be not only a real world footgun in a language which already has plenty of footguns but also a PR footgun - because for "consistency" the committee removed the safety from the safety feature and I believe in C++ 26 they will repair this so it's just pointless rather than actively worse...
by nphardon | 2025-08-22 15:45:26+00:00
Yea, I think it's one of those things that I won't understand from the outside looking in. I'm in semiconductor software so I do a lot of classical numerical methods, graph theory, and ML research, like converting obscure ML algorithms heavy on math from academia for our ML teams. I don't think I'll get the technical side of what is now called ai without OJT in it.
by krapp | 2025-08-22 15:45:46+00:00
It's the network effect in action - most people just wanted "Twitter without Elon's bullshit" and Bluesky provided that.

Mastodon is great but most of the arguments for using Mastodon over Bluesky are honestly arguments most people don't care about, and the Mastodon community can be aggressive and hostile to newcomers, which is great for sustaining a community and preserving your culture against Eternal September but not great for onboarding new people.
by Kinrany | 2025-08-22 15:46:07+00:00
> You validate that strings are UTF-8 at the place where you care that they are UTF-8.

The problem with this, as with any lack of static typing, is that you now have to validate at _every_ place that cares, or to carefully track whether a value has already been validated, instead of validating once and letting the compiler check that it happened.
by uberduper | 2025-08-22 15:46:12+00:00
Similar, but no. Our display used parallel wires that spanned the width of the display as cathodes. In front of that were positively charged "gating wires" that also spanned the width of the display. Then on glass, a laser etched conductive film made vertical strips which the phosphor was deposited making RGB anodes. Turn on the right cathode, gating wires, and RGB anodes to light a line of pixels.
by nyargh | 2025-08-22 15:46:25+00:00
I've found a lot of utility in this. Small throw away utility apps where I just want to automate some dumb thing once or twice and the task is just unusual enough that I can't just grab something off the shelf.

I reached for claude code to just vibe a basic android ux to drive some rest apis for an art project as the existing web UI would be a PITA to use under the conditions I had. Worked well enough and I could spend my time finishing other parts of the project. It would not have been worth the time to write the app myself and I would have just suffered with the mobile web UI instead. Would I have distributed that Android app? God no, but it did certainly solve the problem I had in that moment.
by ecshafer | 2025-08-22 15:46:28+00:00
> It’s faster than Node or Python, with a better type system than either. It’s got a much easier learning curve than Rust. It has a good stdlib and tooling. Simple syntax with usually only one way to do things. Error handling has its problems but I still prefer it over Node, where a catch clause might receive just about anything as an “error”.

I feel like I could write this same paragraph about Java or C#.
by smegger001 | 2025-08-22 15:46:34+00:00
I would imagine there is some sort of incentive structure for the megamillions being offered by meta to these people not just throwing all of the money at them upfront. Payout structed around meeting measurable goals not just show up and collect fuck you money. Or maybe it is silcon valley redux and they will set on the roof with big head what do I know.
by Rafadekoken | 2025-08-22 15:47:02+00:00
Introdução Já imaginou um material tão fino que é praticamente invisível, mas ao mesmo tempo mais resistente que o aço? Pois é, não estamos falando de quadrinhos da Marvel. Esse material existe, tem nome de ficção científica e atende por: grafeno.

Desde que foi descoberto, no início dos anos 2000, ele virou estrela em laboratórios do mundo inteiro. Só que, apesar de toda fama, muita gente ainda não entende direito o que ele é — e por que tantos cientistas estão apostando nele como o “material do futuro”.
by christophilus | 2025-08-22 15:47:40+00:00
I find Rust's stdlib to be lacking vs Go, and so the average Rust project has a lot of dependencies. To me, Rust feels like the systems-programming equivalent to Node + NPM. Also, the compilation speed was really painful last time I used it. I'm used to the speed of Zig, Hare, Go, Bun. Rust makes me want to jab myself in the eye with a spork.
by xienze | 2025-08-22 15:49:00+00:00
> The money train assures that AGI/FSD will always be 6-18 months away

I vividly remember when some folks from Microsoft come to my school to give a talk at some Computer Science event and proclaimed that yep, we have working AGI, the only limiting factor is hardware, but that should be resolved in about ten years.

This was in 2001.

Some grifts in technology are eternal.
by mbStavola | 2025-08-22 15:49:05+00:00
> it has obvious limitations (and generally it can be called unsound, especially around thread locals)

Is this really better than what we have now? I don't think async is perfect, but I can see what tradeoffs they are currently making and how they plan to address most if not all of them. "General" unsoundness seems like a rather large downside.

> In future I plan to create a custom "green-thread" fork of `std` to ease limitations a bit

Can you go more in-depth into these limitations and which would be alleviated by having first class support for your approach in the compiler/std?
by newpavlov | 2025-08-22 15:49:10+00:00
You have an inevitable overhead of managing the owned buffer when compared against simply passing mutable borrow to an already existing buffer. Imagine if `io::Read` APIs were constructed as `fn read(&mut self, buf: Vec<u8>) -> io::Resul<Vec<u8>>`.

Parity with synchronous programming is an explicit goal of Rust async declared many times (e.g. see here https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-project-goals/issues/105). I agree with your rant about the illusion of synchronicity, but it does not matter. The synchronous abstraction is immensely useful in practice and less leaky it is, the better.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-22 15:49:22+00:00
That sounds like your kernel refusing to create that file, nothing to do with Go.

$ cat main.go package main import ( "log" "os" ) func main() { f, err := os.Create("\xbd\xb2\x3d\xbc\x20\xe2\x8c\x98") if err != nil { log.Fatalf("create: %v", err) } _ = f } $ go run . $ ls -1 ''$'\275\262''='$'\274'' ⌘' go.mod main.go
by duckerude | 2025-08-22 15:49:53+00:00
The big problem isn't invalid UTF-8 but invalid UTF-16 (on Windows et al). AIUI Go had nasty bugs around this (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/59971) until it recently adopted WTF-8, an encoding that was actually invented for Rust's OsStr.

WTF-8 has some inconvenient properties. Concatenating two strings requires special handling. Rust's opaque types can patch over this but I bet Go's WTF-8 handling exposes some unintuitive behavior.

There is a desire to add a normal string API to OsStr but the details aren't settled. For example: should it be possible to split an OsStr on an OsStr needle? This can be implemented but it'd require switching to OMG-WTF-8 (https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2295-os-str-pattern.html), an encoding with even more special cases. (I've thrown my own hat into this ring with OsStr::slice_encoded_bytes().)

The current state is pretty sad yeah. If you're OK with losing portability you can use the OsStrExt extension traits.
by joshcanhelp | 2025-08-22 15:50:04+00:00
I don’t love spending time on LinkedIn but I do love that you know what you’re going to get when you go there. There’s not some fake underlaying goal like “keeping people connected.” You’re there to promote yourself and your company, find a job, or hire a person. If you’re not doing any of those things you can just not go there and you won’t miss a thing. If you need a job after 2 years, get back in there, play the game, then log off when you’re done. IMHO it’s about as honest as a large online social network can get.
by DrillShopper | 2025-08-22 15:50:18+00:00
Your use case is one that I have been gently leaning into for small projects at work and personal projects - the LLM is used to give me an initial ideal and code. In a sense, the LLM writes "the one I throw away", and by exploring the limitations of what it produces I both get a better idea of the problem domain and more confidence in actually implementing something useful.
by kouteiheika | 2025-08-22 15:50:27+00:00
I thought about fixing Flash Attention too so that I don't have to recompile it every time I update Python or pytorch (it's the only special snowflake dependency that I need to manually handle), but at the end of the day it's not that much of a pain to justify the time investment.

If I'm going to invest time here then I'd rather just write my own attention kernels and also do other things which Flash Attention currently doesn't do (8-bit and 4-bit attention variants similar to Sage Attention, and focus on supporting/optimizing primarily for GeForce and RTX Pro GPUs instead of datacenter GPUs which are unobtanium for normal people).
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-22 15:51:12+00:00
A person who has schizophrenia and hallucinates to a greater extent than LLMs are clearly defective and not intelligent or sentient.

Because of this we should euthanize all schizophrenics. Just stab them to death or put a bullet in their heads right? I mean they aren’t intelligent or sentient so you shouldn’t feel anything when you do this.

I’m baffled as to why people think of this in terms of PRs. Like the LLM is intelligent but everyone’s like oh it’s not following my command perfectly therefore it’s not intelligent.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-22 15:51:17+00:00
Personally I never understood the problem with tar balls.

The only options you ever need are tar -x, tar -c (x for extract and c for create). tar -l if you wanna list, l for list.

That's really it, -v for verbose just like every other tool if you wish.

Examples:

tar -c project | gzip > backup.tar.gz cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -l cat backup.tar.gz | gunzip | tar -x

You never need anything else for the 99% case.
by runjake | 2025-08-22 15:51:22+00:00
I've bought two counterfeit drives on Amazon -- one in 2024, and one in 2025. One sold by Amazon. Another I thought I was buying from Amazon directly but came from a seller.

They looked completely, COMPLETELY legit. Enough that I initially doubted OEM support when the drives failed and I contacted them and they pointed out my drive's serial number doesn't even match the legit's format. They weren't even relabeled from a lower tier model.

The saving grace is that I have Prime, so getting refunds was relatively easy after a couple quick back and forths.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-22 15:51:53+00:00
I'm somewhat astonished at the per-capita household use of water per day. I assume it must mostly be for watering lawns?

We have a swimming pool that leaks (we were quoted $125k to fix it since the deck will need replacing, and with interest rates being what they are, borrowing to fix it would be rather painful), and we use only 51gal/person/day at our home. I estimate that if fixing the pool would save another 10.
by nmorgan27 | 2025-08-22 15:52:11+00:00
For decades, operating systems have defined how humans interact with computers: punch cards to keyboards, terminals to GUIs, desktops to the web. Each leap compressed complexity and brought machines closer to us.

Today’s interfaces still fall short of our demands. Researching, planning, managing apps, and synthesizing information all require manual coordination and technical literacy.

What if the OS were conversational? What if you could describe your intent, like “Plan my week, draft emails, summarize MIT news,” and the system handled the workflow?

This is the promise of the LLM OS, a concept described by Andrej Karpathy and now emerging in real products. Powered by large language models and reasoning agents, the LLM OS abstracts away complexity and aligns machine execution with human intent.

I wrote a blog post exploring this shift: https://subconscious.dev/blog/dawn-of-a-new-interface

Is this the next true computing paradigm or just a layer on top of existing ones?